React: Effective UI Practices

As web development evolves, it is important to choose the right practices that help us create a scalable, readable, maintainable, and testable codebase. In this blog series, we will look at different practices that help us create such a codebase.

This blog series is divided into three topics:

1. Application Design
2. State Management
3. Testing Practices

Application Design

Understanding how to convert business requirements into a React codebase with minimal effort is crucial. In today's blog, we will be exploring the following practices under Application Design:

• Extracting Design Components
• Building Application Logic as Custom Hooks
• Embracing Component Architecture

Extracting Design Components

UI applications are nothing but a composition of design components such as buttons, tables, and accordions. These design components can be as granular as a button, icon, or form row, or as large as a table, accordion, or form. It is important to decouple these design components from business logic so that:

• We can reuse them across all places without redesigning them every time.
• Design changes can be applied in a single place and reflect everywhere.
• We can test the behaviour of these design components in an isolated environment since they are decoupled from business logic.

Building Application Logic as Custom Hooks

React Hooks are not just another feature; they represent a paradigm shift in the React development journey. By embracing React Hooks, developers can focus more on building the application logic rather than grappling with React’s complexities. This shift orchestrates:

• Efficient code organisation, which helps improve the reusability and maintainability of behaviours.
• Easier testing.
• Improved overall application performance by avoiding unnecessary re-renders.

Reference: Reusing Logic with Custom Hooks

Embracing Component Architecture

Component architecture is a fundamental concept in React development. Breaking our application into smaller components instead of having one bulk component is as important as extracting design components and behaviours. As the complexity of a component increases, it is a good idea to split it into separate components to make your code:

• More readable and maintainable.
• Easier to test.
• Loosely coupled with other behaviours and components.

Reference: Break the UI into a component hierarchy

That is all for today. In our next blog, we will look at some of the best practices for managing and designing state in React.