Video Transcript

Well hello, everyone, my name is Chad green, and I’m one of the consultants here at kinetic data. And I’m here to talk to you about an exciting new technology that kinetic has adopted.

This talk will be on them beautiful front ends that we’ve been alluding to. So who here has heard of the JavaScript framework react? A couple of you? How many of you have had an opportunity to work with it? Not quite as many. Well, um, don’t worry. The friendly folks here at connect data are excited to get you going and help you learn it.

In fact, we have a training seminar starting tomorrow, and all of our materials will be made available on community. So though, for those of you who haven’t heard of React, the question you must be asking yourself is what is react and why should I care?

To answer the first part, React is a JavaScript library used to manage interface code for complex responsive applications. And the reason why you should care is that react will save you time, money, and headaches. Several years ago, Facebook, the creators of React, realize they had a problem.

It wasn’t that they were collecting too much data. That was the problem more recently. In order to grow their user base, they had to keep their platform new and exciting. This meant adding new features, while speeding up the platform.

The existing code base growing complexity leading to code debt, the code that increased the time required to complete new features and improvements. This in turn caused the cost to increase to combat the growing code that Facebook came up with React. Now lots of companies use React to build their portals.

React is a single page application. A single page application dynamically modifies the web page rather than loading a new web page. This creates a better user experience by minimizing the number of page reloads. So what makes react so great?

React allows rendering of user interfaces from pure JavaScript. JavaScript is native to all browsers making in my opinion, the most powerful language on the web. React is narrow in scope and tightly focused. Vince Lombardi a coach known for winning said success demands a singleness of purpose. React achieves the success by doing one thing and doing that one thing well, react scope is to focus only on the view and the MVC pattern. What is the MVC pattern you ask?

MVC is a software design pattern that divides the code into three responsibilities, you have your view your controller and your model users. The view is what the user sees. When the user interacts with the page, they trigger controller, controllers manipulate the models models update the view, reacts focus on the view limits the responsibility of the code. This helps the developer to write declarative code that is easier to read. Reacts name describes how it meets its purpose.

The two components of a modern application are its models. Its its data state, which are the models and the UI, which are the views. On the left, here, we have a set of data and on the right is a chart that builds built from that data. When the radio button is changed across the top.

The react will react to the change in data and update the UI accordingly. All the portal developer needs to do to update the graph is changed the underlying data. Now there are many single page applicate framework applications single page application frameworks to choose from.

Here at kinetic we’ve tried a few of them out. We tried Angular one, Angular x knock on Ember, but we decided on React and why because React is open source. React is well established. React has a mature development environment. React allows for server and client code to be developed independently from one another. The speed and ease of use is one reason why kinetic has decided to build all of its new solutions in React. Why is the portal developer do I think React is so great.

React is a component driven library that helps me produce application code that is easy to follow. Give react a try. I know you’ll agree.

Thank you.

 

 

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