What is the major difference in React (web app) and PHP being not a web app - or how do I decide what to use

#ELI5

  • LilDestructiveSheepOP
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    fedilink
    11 year ago

    @AvgCakeSlice hey there,

    If I get you right this means, that React basically calls the back-end from the client when needed - so potential risk for injection?

    And PHP or C# are doing it beforehand and send the stuff to the client?

    • @AvgCakeSlice
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      11 year ago

      No, not necessarily. React usually calls the backend through HTTP requests in order to fetch data. The backend code is written as an API, not a full-blown web application, that handles those requests, validates the request, permissions, business logic, etc, and then returns a response. The backend code is the gatekeeper between the client and any databases or external API’s in your application.

      Traditionally you would use REST API’s, although there are more modern ways of communicating with a backend like with graphQL. But if you’re just starting I would learn how to write a REST API using PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, etc and go from there. REST API’s are pretty straightforward. Essentially your server just exposes a bunch of “endpoints” which are URL’s that represent a resource (for example https://mycoolwebsite.io/api/users) and making certain calls to those endpoints prompts the server to perform some action (for example, an HTTP GET request to api/users/123 gives you the information of the user with the ID ‘123’) the server typically serializes the response data to JSON, so that the client can then receive the response from the server and do something with it. When writing your backend, you are responsible for defining these endpoints in your code and writing the logic that executes whenever a given endpoint is called. For example, when creating a new user (with an HTTP POST request to api/users), you may want to send an email to the newly-created user for them to validate their email address. You would do this by calling some external email service like SendGrid, Mailchimp, etc. and sending a validation email to the address that the user sent in the request body. After that you would create a new user record in the database and initialize the “is_account_verified” field of that user to false. In another endpoint (api/users/{id}/verify-email) you would then check if the verification email has expired or not, then change the verified flag in the DB if it is a valid link.

        • @AvgCakeSlice
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          11 year ago

          Well, both, but if you’re just talking about the frontend, then yeah I’d use a frontend framework like React (though personally I’d rather use Vue or Svelte if I had the choice)

            • @AvgCakeSlice
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              21 year ago

              It’s mostly preference. Vue and Svelte are easier to work with, IMO. React is perfectly fine and there is a larger community around it as it is more widely adopted by large companies, but there’s also a lot of crap so it can be hard as a novice to discern what is good and what isn’t.