How is using node.js better than symfony for a react frontend?

Question

I have built my application (an ERP) using symfony and twig and jquery. Now, almost every change of my application is done after a redirection i.e. if the user wants to edit something, he clicks on "edit", gets redirected to a new page with forms, validates forms, and gets back to the previous page which reflects the change.

This look and feel is pretty old and I want my application to get in line with new SaaS standards like Trello (the best example I could think of / Slack is not bad either).

I've started to make uses of React in my symfony application, inside my twig files. However, I see most react users are working with node.js, and eventually express. I don't know about those enough to tell if that's relevant to make the change.

Say I plan to change my frontend a lot, that my backend features will become available through a REST API, and that I want the Trello look and feel thanks to an implementation of ReactJS (not Angular, that choice is made): what good arguments would advocate for changing technology (which would combine well with ReactJS), and which technology should that be?

(If you understand my issue but feel my question could be improved, don't hesitate to suggest edits)

Answer 1

In my opinion following are the good arguments to change the technology from Symfony to Nodejs:

1) Keep full JS stack, no other languages involved. This might help lower the development and maintenance costs of the app.

2) WebSockets, in case there is a business requirement to keep a lot of opened connections (ie. cooperative tasks, chats).

3) Async operations (filesystem, remote requests etc..) might offer a better performance compared to the more traditional synchronous programming approach.

In my opinion Symfony is a great choice for a backend, it's robust, clean and has a great community. So unless you have a solid reason to rewrite your app, I would recommend to stick with SF.

Answer 2

Angular and ReactJS are not the same kind of tool, angular is a MVC based tool whereas ReactJS is a flow rendering tool (only the view).

Symfony is a good product to maintain services and build strong apis. Both Angular and ReactJS aims at working with json strings and power awesome ui without jQuery framework!

To my mind Angular is usefull to respect the single principle responsibility, to test and to maintain an application and working with services. ReactJS is really good for realtime interaction, mind your specs and appreciate what is your real need.