Building First Large React Application

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New React developer here. I'm planning on starting my first major project for my business. I have a ton of Excel templates for various purposes (prioritization, standard operating procedures, problem solving, root cause analysis, etc.). My idea is to put everything online and build out a system my customers can use for their facilities. Each facility would have a manager, then various users under them. Security is obviously important.

Most tutorials merely show a single page application, but this is far larger. What is the proper way to build something like this out from a technology standpoint? High level overview is fine....looking for guidance.

Best way to handle routes?

Do I use Express in some way shape or form since it can do rendering on the back-end?

How do I connect Express/React if I use this combination? I've read about client/server, but haven't found anything conclusive online that's more recent.

Many thanks!

react-router reactjs express node.js javascript
1 Answers

I'm also new to React/Web Development, but for my projects I like to use a framework on top of React to make scaling easier. My favorites are GatsbyJS and NextJS.

They are both 'static site generators,' in that the end result is static html/css/minimal javascript which loads really quickly. However, NextJS is cool because it's kind of in between a frontend and backend, in that you can use dynamic rendering or server api calls all within its framework so it can do more than just generate a static website. For what you're talking about, I think NextJS could be a good idea.

You can definitely connect a React frontend to an Express backend, here's a youtube tutorial. In my opinion as a somewhat novice web developer, using frameworks like Gatsby or NextJS are way easier. I like that with those frameworks you can just create a file in the /pages/ directory of your src files and it will automatically become a page of your website, and with Next (and maybe Gatbsy too) you can make dynamic routes so you can programmatically create pages.

EDIT: Like the comment to your post says, this answer is very subjective! Hopefully it gives you thinks to look into, though.

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