Blip's usage of React

We began development of this blip codebase with React in late 2013, which was pretty early days for the framework: we were "early adopters." Over time, there's been some changes to the React APIs, which we've had to keep up with in order to keep our React dependency up-to-date, but there's also been some shifting in terms of React best practices, and it is certainly the case that parts of blip reflect outdated practices that are not representative of how we want our React codebase to look going forward. So when you see something written in ES5^a and it looks "weird" or follows a different pattern, you can be pretty sure that it's outdated and does not represent our current opinions on React best practices. (When in doubt: discuss with your fellow developers!)

For more information on what our current opinions and goals are regarding React best practices, see the Recommended reading page from our general React @ Tidepool documentation.

We use React with Redux for state management, so you'll want to read Blip's usage of Redux as well.

^a. ES5 vs. ES2015/ES6 is a reasonably accurate indicator of code age in blip, although we did port some components to ES2015/ES6 when we introduced React Router and redux without changing them much, so while you can be reasonably certain that a weird-looking component written in ES5 reflects an older/outdated way of doing things, not all ES2015/ES6 components necessarily represent our current opinions on best practices. ↩