Netlify is a platform for developers from the company of the same name in San Francisco, used to build performant and dynamic web sites, e-commerce stores and applications. By uniting an ecosystem of technologies, services and APIs into one workflow.
$9
per month per user
React (React.js)
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
React or React.js is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. React enables users to create interactive UIs.
Netlify is a static website host, so it obviously wouldn't work for hosting dynamic websites built in PHP, such as WordPress or Drupal. It works very well with static sites with a git codebase on something like GitHub. It has automatic deployments, which include preview websites. It works very well with this workflow. There are solutions for allowing content authoring on static websites on Netlify, but I would probably reach for something like WordPress or Drupal for that.
React is a JavaScript user interface construction library that works well for:
Developing web apps with dynamic and complicated user interfaces.
creating reusable UI elements that may be used in other applications.
creating single-page applications with dynamic content updates that don't require a page reload.
The Virtual DOM's effective updating mechanism allows it to handle large volumes of data updates.
React, on the other hand, might be less suitable for:
Websites that are simple, stagnant, and have no interaction. Other libraries or simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript may be a better fit in such circumstances.
Web sockets may be a better choice for applications that need real-time updates, such as chat or gaming apps.
When creating mobile apps, React Native is a better option.
Server side rendering only, as React is designed to run on the client side.
I can connect Github/Gitlab repos or drag and drop code folders directly to host them onto the platform, and can customize build and publish details. It handles all granular details itself, so I don't have to worry about configuring everything like I would have to do on an IaaS like AWS
Netlify Platform has inbuilt scalability support - meaning automatic upgrading of servers to handle traffic, without us needing to do anything at all, again, unlike IaaS, where we'd have to manually configure scaling
It has a built in CDN, meaning static applications can be served blazing fast over the web without worrying about traffic or latency
React is fantastic for building performant user interfaces. Our web app is snappy and great for our customers.
React has the philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well which is the view layer of the application. This makes it incredibly intuitive and flexible for developers to use.
React has lead the way in being able to write modular and structured code. It is a drastic improvement since the days of spaghetti jQuery code.
React has an unmatched community. The amount of tools and libraries available is fantastic, and there plenty of solutions available online for common problems.
Debugging React is challenging. Bugs in react code generate stack traces internal to React and it is often totally unclear how it relates to the code you actually wrote.
Relating your React elements to corresponding DOM elements is difficult. The intentional separation of virtual and actual DOM also makes it difficult to map the elements to the structures in the DOM. This is partially ameliorated by the use of the React dev tool, which provides a DOM-like view of the React elements, but the tool still does not provide a direct correspondence with the DOM that is often necessary to figure out why something isn't right.
Because JSX is React-specific and not a language feature, a special compilation process is necessary to convert JSX code to normal JS. Coming from a C++ background, compiling things doesn't bother me, but many JS developers are used to a less structured development.
We interact with the CLI via our CI/CD pipeline. It was very straightforward to get set up, and their documentation is thorough. There are a ton of examples online of various setups. We needed to deploy a React SPA, so we required redirects, which was straightforward with Netlify.
React is just a bit of a different animal. I was avoiding it for the longest time. I thought for sure I would land on Vue or something else with a more approachable and familiar appearance. But after taking an online course in React, I started realize what people were raving about (and complaining about) and decided to implement it at our office for one of our products.
Since it's open-source and very popular, the community support for React and related tools and libraries is excellent. There are a lot of people using the same tools, and so issues tend to get fixed quickly and "recipes" are easy to come by. And since it's backed by Facebook, they have a dedicated engineering team working on the progression of React.
Netlify Platform is the first choice that we are using in this organization continuously and it's been a very promising platform to use. It also maintains the things very well. it also giving a very good updates. It is very easy to use and very easy to learn. overall it is good.
While this is a widely contested debate with various blog posts and benchmarks all over the place, its really a personal choice to determine what works for the team. Coming from a Angular 1.x background, I decided to try a new framework when Angular 2.x was announced and at that time React is gaining popularity and Vue hasn't taken off yet. Compared to Angular 1.x and Vue (hybrid of React and Angular) that split the logic from the html templates, I loved the way React breaks code into components using the jsx syntax. In my mind, this allows for cleaner components and easier maintenance
