CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsreactjsexpressfrontendbackend
EMMANUEL EZEKA
EMMANUEL EZEKA

Reputation: 632

What is the benefit of serving react app(front end) from express app(back end)

I have developed and hosted few react applications but I'm still confused about the word server side rendering. So, I'm curious to know what is the benefit of serving my react applications from an express server.

Thank you as I look forward to your response.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1400

Answers (1)

mdaka
mdaka

Reputation: 191

Please consider clarifying your question, because I don't know also if you use next.js or nuxt.js.

Angular, React, Vue.js are JavaScript frontend frameworks/libraries, which means they are using JavaScript language.

The websites on the Internet contain HTML, CSS, JavaScript Vanilla code. The application you developed using React.js needs to use React.js library source code, and then you need the React.js code to be compiled to JavaScript Vanilla code because the browser at the end needs a JavaScript native code that it can read.

When I need to see your hosted website, I need to write the domain name to see it, so the HTTP request at the end goes to the server which is hosting your react app, thus if your react application contains just a static content, for example, a landing HTML page, then there is no need for server-side rendering from Express(Node.js), Ruby, PHP, Java,...

What I mean by static content is content that doesn’t change in response to different users, all of them will get the same content.

Notice you can host a static website in Github and you still don't need any server-side rendering...

Let's have a small application for a better explanation: If you developed a Portfolio that contains a description of yourself, images of your projects, skills, then here there is no need for a server-side rendering.

But if you developed a system that lets a user who has permission to create a short link from a full URL, then you need a backend server(like Java, Ruby, C#, PHP,...) to host the logic code in order to generate a tiny URL from the full URL, and then save it in a Database, that way any user can click the generated tiny URL then this request goes to your backend server which needs to redirect the user with correct full URL, an application like this cannot be done using React.js alone, you need a server to handle the logic.

Returning to your answering your question: "So, I'm curious to know what is the benefit of serving my react applications from an express server."

If you have static content you can avoid using Express, but if you think your application needs some backend logic in the future, then Express or any other backend framework will help you in that.

*Notice when you have a static website, and you tried to edit the content of it, the users which already visited your website, their browser might cached your website content unless (they disabled this option in their browser), so if your website is cached in users' browsers they might not get the updated content unless you changed the static website file name for example by adding ?092130123 to file name in order to let the users' browser download the updated data

Upvotes: 4

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