Build maintainable React apps — Series
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Good practices and tips for maintainability
The complexity of front-ends drastically increased in the last 20 years; we went very quickly from widgets JavaScript to Single Page Applications.
The pace is still fast, we went from Redux to Mobx and now React hooks in the span of only a few years, making it more than ever essential to welcome change in our applications.
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From widgets to applications

 

 

With React — and libraries from the eco-system — solving most of the challenges of modern front-end architecture (performance, rendering, state management), our primary mission as Front-end Engineers is to build and scale applications in a sustainable way, in other words, in a maintainable way.
The “Build maintainable React apps” series is composed of 3 parts:

 

Part I: Keep your application organized

  1. Break down your application in meaningful parts
  2. Reflect the defined application parts in code organization
Build maintainable React apps — Part I

 

Part II: Ease change: future-proof component code

  1. State management
  2. Loosely Coupled Component
  3. Components decomposition patterns
  4. Enable React warning and keep your dependencies up-to-date
Build maintainable React apps — Part II

 

Part III: Testing strategy and testable components

  1. The many ways to test React code
  2. A good testing strategy example
  3. Make your components testable
Build maintainable React apps — Part III

 

I hope that you will find those tips and best practices useful and that they will inspire you new approaches to keep your React applications maintainable.

 

 

TLDR;

Maintainability is all about finding ways to keep your application in movement.
However, every company operates at a different speed, which impacts the priorities of the technical decisions on the covered subjects.
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An early-stage startup might want to iterate fast and break things to get to product-market fit, resulting in a bigger time investment on “future proof components” that are easy to refactor (ex: duplicated code), however, testing will be less a priority.
A late-stage startup, most likely composed of a bigger engineering team and more demanding clients, might invest more in code organization and testing to guarantee the quality of the product.

 

You will find below a summary of the principles of these articles; it is now your time to choose which ones are a priority for your business and build your architecture principles!

On code organization

  • Identifying the parts (domains) of your application will help to shape a better architecture (ex: state).
  • Investing a small amount of time in finding a proper component’s name is an excellent design exercise that will bring consistency (location and well-defined responsibilities)

 

On component code

  • Custom hooks are an excellent alternative to the Container/View pattern. Let your component focus on UI aspects.
  • Ensure your component relies directly only on data that is displayed; otherwise, use a business logic helper, custom hooks.
  • Beware of bad abstractions; they are the most likely to prevent change.
  • Decomposition patterns and the UI provided by your Product Designer are a good starting point to build well-defined components

 

On testing

  • React applications can be tested in many useful and different ways: E2E tests, Integrations tests, Unit shadow rendering tests, Unit business logic tests
  • Invest time in testing the most important part of your product by defining a testing strategy
  • Make sure your component can be tested easily by avoiding coupling and components embedded in business logic.

 

 

Thanks to Louis Lafont and Jonas for reviewing the series!
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