Developers looking to create interactive UIs often favor libraries and frameworks that have community backing and a simple learning curve.
For that reason, engineers at Colorado software companies Vertafore and Vendavo prefer React. Senior Director Andrew McCulloch said that React has allowed Vertafore to get teams with varying degrees of experience up and running quickly.
The library also comes in handy when addressing another common pain point: hiring. React gives managers a large talent pool to choose from.
“Because React is of high interest in the development world, it’s played a factor in our ability to attract and retain software engineers,” McCulloch said.
React’s high interest in the development world is a primary draw for Vendavo developers. According to Alper Ornek, a senior software engineer, his team prefers React over Vue and Angular because employees have a strong foundation in the language and React components can be reused across company products.
Sometimes, developers must forego personal preference for the greater good of the team. Though Ornek prefers programming with Angular, his department uses React because the team has a strong foundation in the language and it’s easy to learn.
Vue vs. React. vs. Angular: Which is your team’s preferred programming tool?
Vendavo leans toward React because we have a base component library in place and our teams have a strong foundation in the language. We want a standard UX environment based on React to mirror our other applications from a client perspective. React Native is useful for mobile app development. We have a wide range of React components that can be reused across our products.
We have a wide range of React components that can be reused across our products.’’
Tell us about the most recent project you worked on using this tool.
We created our configure, price and quote (CPQ) application admin console from the ground up using React, which calls on our existing REST APIs. The application provides users with a clean UX using our React component library. With Vendavo’s CPQ Cloud, sales teams can achieve improved performance in the quoting cycle. That means more quotes with increased accuracy, less time spent on administrative burdens and more time in front of customers.
Vendavo CPQ Cloud also integrates with Salesforce Sales Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SugarCRM and others, which lowers the cost of implementation.
Do you have any experience using one or more of these other technologies?
We started to use Angular.js and Angular 4.0. in a proof-of-concept project for the CPQ admin console development. Since I’m coming from a back-end programming background, Angular was better structured to me. Its ready-to-use framework handles any mobile or web development needs.
On the other hand, React was an easy to learn, light and flexible framework, great for UI development. It simply requires some extra modules and tweaks to reach the capability level of the Angular framework. Although I was in favor of Angular, we wanted to have the same look and feel among all Vendavo applications through our Pezzi component library, which was written in React. So the call was made in favor of React.
Reusable components are critical to many developers because they are testable. At Vertafore, the software company sees those benefits in React, a library that McCulloch said engineers are able to pick up quickly, regardless of experience.
Vue vs. React. vs. Angular: Which is your team’s preferred programming tool?
We have adopted React as our preferred front-end development tool for the organization. We believe it’s important that we have a modern tool backed by a good open-source community. Because React is of high interest in the development world, it’s played a factor in our ability to attract and retain software engineers.
We believe it’s important that we have a modern tool backed by a good open-source community.’’
Tell us about the most recent project you worked on using this tool.
We have started four new front-end React projects in the last few months, which were bootstrapped from our internal React component library Alloy. React encourages small, testable and easy-to-reason reusable components. We have found React’s APIs to be intuitive as well. We were able to stand up multiple teams quickly, combining those with React experience and those without.
Do you have any experience using one or more of these other technologies?
I have worked in Angular and React at different companies and found a number of areas where the React lifecycle proves easier to understand for everyone. Its manipulation of the DOM is more straightforward and we have avoided the digest cycle pit of despair. Angular 2 is TypeScript first, which provides great structure, maintainability and type safety. That said, it does increase the learning curve for developers coming from non-TypeScript environments.
