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Using LaunchDarkly's Feature Flags with React to Display Real Time Information

Roseanna Mcfarlane on January 17, 2019

Have you ever needed to update information on a web page on short notice but found the whole process complicated, slow and error prone? Editing the...
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MahmoudJbor

Nice article, feature flagging are great, the only issue with these flags, is that in case you have really big features, it will add overhead to manage the code, it will increase the tech dept, because if you release a feature to all customers it will be meatless to have to versions of the same feature and one of them isn't called at all!

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Roseanna Mcfarlane

Thank you :) Yes it's true that it comes down to a cost benefit analysis. Ie, Is the use of feature flags worth the added code and overhead. It will be a case by case basis for sure and dependent on the project scope etc.

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Chris Joy

Good read. Btw I think LaunchDarkly uses Server-Sent Events (not WebSockets)

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Zachary Davis

I can't believe you have to manually enable it for client-side usage. Thank you so much!

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Lev Lazinskiy

Hey Zachary, just FYI you can change this in the project setting to make flags available to the client-side by default.

In practice, we see that most users have significantly more backend flags than frontend flags. The main benefit of not sending these to the frontend are it lowers the payload size which makes everything faster.

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Lev Lazinskiy

Thanks for this great overview of LD!