I have an application that is largely tables and standard pages and forms. However, I have one page this really need to be highly responsive that is probably best developed in React.js.
I would like to have a Flask + Jinja handle the delivery of most of the pages. I understand Facebook does a bit of this with PhP for the majority of the site with React.js handing the responsive components. Is there a Flask library that makes this simple?
I don't think you need to use any library for this as it's pretty straightforward.
All you need to do is:
Make that page using React.js and build the project to make bundle Javascript file which bootstraps the React.js page.
Make div inside your jinja template and import that bundle javascript file.
Here, one important thing is to assign identical 'id' to the Jinja template div and React.js rendering div.
Related
The app
The application was made using ReactJS, React Router Dom, Styled Components and Redux ducks.
The backend we consume is also made by us using Amazon Amplify and GraphQL.
The goal
We need to define the meta tags of one of the application pages so that it is possible to share personalized links to users
in social networks using OpenGraphic meta tags and the like.
The problem
The project was made in ReactJS and ReactJS has only one HTML page as root (/public/index.html), in this way, everything is generated with Javascript in a root tag, and when it arrives in the browser it is transpiled, as we already know. The problem is that the crawlers responsible for understanding the meta tags are not able to understand Javascript and end up not finding the dynamic data that I am defining on the page that I need to share the link on. They understand that there is one html file and only.
Attempts to resolve the issue
1) Define the meta tags in the /public/index.html file itself
This solution doesn't work because the data we are using is dynamic and the index.html file is a static file
2) Using react-helmet
The solution allows meta tags to be defined, but as already mentioned, crawlers don't understand JS. So, despite being on the page, the meta tags do not appear when sharing the link.
3) Using some SSR technology
This is a possible solution, but we were unable to integrate any SSR Framework into React. And it is not feasible to change the base technology of the project. We can't just switch from React to Next, for example, as the project is already complete.
4) Using a small server made with express.js along with the React application to replace the meta tags in index.html with string.replace() simulating something like an SSR
This solution works, but it causes two requests to be made every time the page is accessed, once by express.js and once on the front-end side by React. Due to the number of requests increasing, this solution was discarded. But if necessary, you can do it. In this case it is also necessary to check if Amplify can keep the application and the small server running in the same project.
5) Using react-snap with react-helmet
React-snap allows you to create html snapshots of the pages of a React project based on their routes and links, this added to react-helmet generates a perfect solution for links to be treated well by web crawlers when they are shared. But the solution doesn't work with dynamic routes. For example, /your-route/:id is a dynamic route that expects an id to be fully defined. React-snap gets lost when trying to create a snapshot of a route that only exists when the id is set. Unfortunately, this solution doesn't work.
These were the solutions we used to try to solve the problem, but it was not possible yet. Probably attempt 4 would be the most ideal to solve the problem. But we are looking for the best way that will not generate reworks and future problems. If someone knows a better way to do that, would help us a lot!
we're working with Apostrophe CMS v3 and we're trying to add some custom apps to the pages with React. I was able to add components inside using the React CND scripts and loading components as script files in views/layout.html. But it probably isn't best practice. I was wondering if theres a way to add React apps into Apostrophe using npm packages and imports. Thank you very much!
It looks like this question was cross-posted to the Github Discussions forum: https://github.com/apostrophecms/apostrophe/discussions/3393
The response there from the lead software architect:
You can do it in two ways. Which is best depends on your needs.
If you are building a single-page React app but you need some dynamically edited CMS content, you should most likely keep building your React app just as you have been, and use Apostrophe's REST APIs to access piece and
page CMS content where you need it. See the documentation on our REST APIs.
On the other hand, if you are building a pretty normal CMS-driven website
but you have a few experiences inside your pages that would benefit from
embedding a React application, you should carry on with your Nunjucks
templates for Apostrophe as you normally would to build a website with
Apostrophe, and in addition set up a webpack build of your own to build
your React apps, and push the output to a ui/public/build.js file nested
in any module of your Apostrophe project. Any .js file found in a
ui/public subdirectory of a module is automatically included in the
frontend bundle generated by Apostrophe.
In that situation, you can still use the REST APIs to access data from the
React app, or you can pass data via data attributes in your markup. If you
do the latter, the | jsonAttribute Nunjucks filter is helpful to turn it
into a string that is safe for incorporation into a quoted attribute in
your markup.
Hope that helps!
How do sites use ReactJS on their web pages when the whole site is not built with React?
I was under the impression that if you used ReactJS then the whole site had to be delivered using ReactJS.
So for example, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/scores-fixtures which is part of the BBC website seems to use React (as per How to tell if a web application is using ReactJs ).
Always remember that react is just plain old Javascript, if you read the documentation you'd know that you can import it even with a tag or in any way you see fit.
Here's the link to the docs:
https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-website.html
How to inject react component into handlebar template which is loading dynamically at run time.
edit: tl;dr: This is a great question. Injecting pre-rendered React components into an html templating language (like handlebars) can improve the load times of your site and improve the "indexability" of your content for search engines (your SEO). the trick is you have to server-side render (SSR) and you don't want to load all of the code into the browser on the initial request so you need code-splitting. These can be accomplished with webpack. Until recently they have not been possible without a framework like Next.js... There are now 3 options, and the conclusion I have come to is that the only one worth using is: React-Universal-Component
If you want to learn more about the benefits you get from rendering your content into HTML before the JS assets, CSS assts, etc. are loaded, this article on Isomorphic or Universal Javascript is a good place to start. Writing Isomorphic/Universal JavaScript is about writing code that is flexible in its ability to render client-side or server-side.
There are a couple if React top-level APIs that make this easy, and a handful of transpiling/compiling/bundling libraries (I use Webpack), that are necessary (if you don't want to compile the template in the browser).
Because React components are almost always written in JSX they must be transpiled to JavaScript before they can be rendered. This is typically done with ReactDOM.render() which will call React.createElement() for us.
React also has a function, ReactDOMServer.renderToString() which takes the React element, builds the HTML (on the server-side) and converts it into a string. This is what enables us to inject pre-rendered React into html templates.
For an example of the process which I have just described, see this example, but it's out of date now.
Conclusion: Injecting a React component into a handlebar template is not worth its time because there are finally libraries to help us do this (see my first link). IMO SSR React is important for sites that need the SEO benefits, and it will also improve your load times (especially on under-powered devices) if your app properly performs SSR and code-splitting.
I have individual pages and initially I wanted to use angularJS because of data binding and the many other neat features. I also ended up using requireJS simply to help me manage my dependancies better as the list of javascript libraries I'm using is growing.
My question is using AngularJS with requireJS a no no for non single page web apps?
It's not a no-no. You can definitely use angular on non-single page apps. You just will lose a lot of the functionality - ie the stuff between "pages". You app will essentially be recreated on every page.
I've used angular for a multi-page site (basically a product search engine), with each page being separate. I used GET and POST to transfer stuff across pages, but ultimately, I wanted to use angular for rendering the content on the page because it's just neat and clean.