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Comment by christkv | Hacker News Reader

React has been god sent for us as we slowly modernise an application that is a mess of server rendered html and hacked together frontend code.

Slowly we are rewriting individual pieces as embedded React components (no SPA here) and moving to a proper API layer that the components talk to. The separation of concern has made it a loot easier to increase code coverage and ensure a controlled rollout of new features.

We also just bit the bullet and paid for syncfusion to use on our frontend to avoid reinventing the wheel for a lot of the functionality we need.

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> The separation of concern has made it a loot easier to increase code coverage and ensure a controlled rollout of new features.

This can be achieved (and more easily) by separating your templating from your business logic at the package level. If you know what you're doing you can keep things separate and your import graph non-cyclical, if you don't know what you're doing you're going to recreate the mess in your components and API anyway.

Source: Tired of seeing this happen again and again and again and again. And fixing it.

Everything done badly of course causes the same effect. But we are dealing with a massive mess that is the worst case of both worlds.

Since we need to also provide an API going forward to our clients, for our usecase this was a great solution. However we are not doing an SPA, the main framework and navigation is still server driven. The difference is that the "create new user dialog" is now a react component that calls the corresponding api.

Running through the API also makes it easier for us to handle the caching of data at that layer instead of a mix of jquery calls and random div HTML generation.

Honest question. As someone whose only worked with open source tech in React such as Bootstrap, Semantic UI, Material UI, etc, what is the advantage of a paid UI framework like this?

Maybe stability? Besides Semantic UI I found that other frameworks are nowhere near as mature. I guess if you're a big company its a small price to pay but it also seems like you're paying a grand + per month for something with tons of free alternatives.

You're paying for the support you need when your developer can't fit requirement X into the component, or when they run into a bug, or whatever other reason.

700 usd a year for the library for a developer. It saves us a ton of time as its a B2B business and we use a lot of stuff like a calendar view, gantt diagrams and scheduling. Rewriting it from scratch of adapting a random set of components would be more expensive in time and resources.

godsend

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