React Slowly

And Still End Up Fast

Who Am I?

Stevie Mayhew
CTO @ Little Giant

stevie.mayhew@littlegiant.co.nz

React to what?

• ReactJS
• Facebook Backed
• Originally released 2013
• Currently version 0.14.0

My History

• First time playing around React 0.8.0
• Still actively maintain others code written in React 0.8.0
• First code contribution April 2014 - react-bootstrap
• First code I personally wrote in production September 2014 - React 0.10.0

Why React?

• Easy to reason about
• Components are reusable
• Large ecosystem of developers
• Makes sense for larger stateful applications
• We don't use it everywhere!

Slowly moving forward

• Reasonable to build small components for your websites
• Start with something non-critical

Don't forget to think about it though

• Dumping data onto the page to load via `data` attributes
  • Not practical
  • Not scalable
  • Not reasonable
  • Not my problem
• API to retrieve all the data at once
• API to retrieve data on load
• API to retrieve data preemptively

API Options

• RestfulServer (https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-restfulserver)
• RESTful API (https://github.com/colymba/silverstripe-restfulapi)
• Roll your own (https://github.com/your-name-here/silverstripe-awesomeapi)

React Options

• Pure
• Flux
  • Redux
  • Predictable state containment
  • Everything we write is now using this pattern
  • Think its crazy to do without it
• Immutable.js is also a good idea

A note on build systems

• Grunt (slow)
• Gulp (medium)
• Webpack (fast)

Live Code Example

Uh oh.

THE END

Thanks for listening.

Questions?