It’s been about a year since me and Kir Belevich started using React at Lazada Group for some internal admin interfaces. We learned a lot during that time and our minds have been heavily shifted by that one-way data-flow philosophy React pushes.

Since React is not exactly a framework, but just a view library, we have both freedom of choice and a burden of responsibility, like: how to structure your application, how to manage its state or how to style your components. And styling was one of the first problems we were trying to address.

Problems with styling

There are many issues with…

Reactive future

What we love about React is how simple and enjoyable its declarative way of constructing components. And when GraphQL was introduced our minds were blown because we realized: we can do the same with data, describing what our components need and not caring about how and when it will be delivered.

Also, Netflix introduced JSONGraph and Falcor this May. What’s interesting here is that working completely independent from Facebook they came up with very similar ideas. So, basically we can see a solid trend here.

REST present

There is one frustrating thing about GraphQL/Falcor though: both of them require certain backend implementation…