Why I’m going to learn React and REDUX

I’m investigating the full technology stack for a new project with one of my customers. It’s about a new product with many data related use cases. In terms of cost effectiveness and DRYness, it makes sense to have at least one app to have generic CRUD functionality. Administrators and local users can use it to manage the contents of many tables in the database.

After hours of scouring the internet for canonical crud functionality on top of a relational database cq RESTful API, I found ng-admin by Marmelab. Great! It’s actually the only one with a mature code base, based on Angular(JS) that I could find (apart from mCrud). If you’re a developer and you’re building an application with many data-related use cases for a relatively small base of users or local users that are easy to instruct, you should definitely give ng-admin a try.

In another project that I work with together with the customer, we use AngularJS and Angular Material already and for that reason, I was inclined to repeat that frontend stack for the new project. But then things changed.

I navigated upwards to the company profile of Marmelab on Github and I noticed admin-on-rest.

“A frontend framework for building admin SPAs on top of REST services, using React and Material Design”

You really need to see the demo video to get an idea of what it’s capable of. Marmelab wrote about the admin-on-rest product on a blog.

“For two years, we’ve been developing admin GUIs on top of REST APIs using ng-admin. During the same period, we’ve progressively switched from Angular.js to React.js as our framework of choice for Single Page Applications. The logical next step was to rewrite ng-admin from the ground up in React.js. That’s what admin-on-rest is; it’s open-source, and it’s awesome.”

I also need to build functionality for more sophisticated use cases that I cannot expect users to fulfill using change-record-with-form user interfaces. So, it makes sense that I learn the language that the admin-on-rest tool is based on. That is React. And apparently now in 2017, it doesn't make sense to learn just React. One should learn REDUX as well.

So here and today my React+REDUX adventure starts.

I’m feeling confident starting this journey since I’ve got plenty of Javascript experience and I’m used to working my way along lengthy, steep learning curves. The one of learning Ext JS to name one in particular. Also countless of developers are using React. So I’m eager to venture on the beaten track of using React and see where it leads.