Hi there, fellow Frontend Architects! Today I recommend a very interesting article from Jack Franklin entitled “Why I don’t miss React“. Jack’s article comes as a balm of lucidity that alleviates our pain with those angry people around the Internet who attacks anyone who dares to question the holiness of ReactJS. In fact, I am also happy to see a big shift in the speech of the creators of video courses, who are now displaying a more balanced and honest defense of React.
I have been expressing similar concerns for many years. My students at the University can attest to that! Unfortunately, for almost one decade many companies have been blindly buying into the fad of the React’s “silver bullet” and many are now paying a high price because of that… either by being stuck with a technology that did not fully align with their needs or by suffering the consequences of a radical migration (one example here). A well-trained Frontend Architect could’ve helped avoid all that.
Part of our responsibility as architects is to promote, coordinate, and compile the results of architectural discussions within our organizations, which necessarily includes healthy debates on tech stacks. Obviously, React is a great technology (no doubt), and I have code hundreds of thousands of lines of code in it – which allowed me to see the good, the bad, and the ugly. But even around 8 years ago (more or less) I was already making sure that our tech stack discussions would include other players such as Vue, Angular, Ember, Lit-HTML, Svelte, etc. However, I rarely advocated an approach that leans towards pure JavaScript, as Jack’s article did. So his point of view, supported by solid practical experience, is very valuable to me.
Architectural work is all about listing the pros and cons of possible technologies and patterns, balancing conflicting requirements and forces, being critical about trends and benchmarks, managing expectations of the varied stakeholders, strategizing solutions for the downfalls, collecting inputs from multiple levels of the organization, promoting communication and healthy discussions, and so on. So even if you are a huge fan of React, in order to be an effective architect you will need to master the art of putting personal feelings aside to sincerely and holistically review its merits and shortcomings. Jack’s article can help all of us to give one more step in that direction.