What!? ReactJS isn’t for SPAs anymore?

ReactJS has been a popular choice for building single-page applications (SPAs) for years. However, with the release of new documentation, they stripped away almost all mention of SPAs to some people's confusion. Instead, they are pushing the broader idea of “React Architecture.” But what is “React Architecture”? To summarize it:

React architecture is flexible and does not enforce any particular pattern to write a complex application. Developers are free to choose the design pattern of their choice. React architecture is built on a solid foundation and is simple, flexible, and extensible.

In other words, React is a library that can be used to build complex applications with the design pattern of your choice. The primary piece to this change is React Server Components, which were teased a couple of years ago. React Server Components are components that can be rendered on both the server and the client. They allow developers to build applications that span both sides of the application, combining the rich interactivity of client-side apps with the improved performance of traditional server rendering. The new documentation now reflects React as a library to use on both the client and server sides. It pushes single-page apps as a footnote and now recommends using a framework like Next.js that incorporates React Server Components instead of create-react-app.

The React team has admitted that they need to do a better job of adequately communicating the initiatives they have going on. We were teased with React Server Components and other features like Suspense a couple of years ago, but there was mostly radio silence after that until the new docs were released, making it appear like React took a hard right turn off the SPAs highway. But React has been silently heading in this new "direction" for a while now; it just wasn't noticeable.

Is React no longer for SPAs? NO, it’s not only for SPAs but also for the server. The React team wants you to start considering React in that way so you can get the best performance possible for your users by first considering frameworks that use the newer features of React to their fullest extent. But in the end, the beauty of “React Architecture” is that you can choose how to use React.