Date Archives → May 2016

Should I use shouldComponentUpdate?

So you heard React was fast, and decided to give it a go. You grabbed a boilerplate, started working through it, and noticed shouldComponentUpdate and PureRenderMixin. Some googling reveals these are the things you use to make React fast. But wasn’t React already fast?

The answer is that React is fast… sometimes. The other times, you should use shouldComponentUpdate. But when are the other times? Wouldn’t it be so much easier if there was just a simple yes-no question which you could ask to decide whether to use shouldComponentUpdate or not? And wouldn’t you believe it, there is!

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How I learned to stop worrying and love the JSX

So you’ve heard the commotion about React, and thought you’d take a look. And you’ve liked what you’ve seen! Or you did, until you saw this:

<div onClick={this.handleClick}>JSX butters my toast</div>

OK. You’re happy to give a new technology the benefit of the doubt. But this? Didn’t we escape PHP years ago? And what ever happened to separation of concerns?!

But I’m here to reassure you that not everything is as it seems. The above code is not JavaScript-in-HTML. If anything it actually promotes separation of concerns, especially compared to “competitor framework A”. And its best feature?

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