In addition to the teams behind Netflix, eBay, Airbnb, Dropbox, Instagram, and Facebook, there are currently over 1.3 million websites and applications built on React, making it one of the most powerful and ubiquitous frameworks of all time.
React has quickly become the first-approach solution for developers to build web apps, mobile apps, desktop, and even VR. Now coupled with the innovations being rolled out with React Hooks, the growing need for integrated developer solutions is on the horizon.
A Call for Web-Simplicity
Ben Alpert, a React core engineer stated at a previous React conference:
“We’ve lost a lot of web-simplicity… What we’d like to have is the ability to create a single file for your app and just run that without having to set anything up… We need the community to build tools more like this.”
The Reactide team has responded to this challenge by approaching the developer community for more insight. We talked to dozens of React developers at various ReactJS New York events and identified primary pain points in React development:
Custom React boiler-plating requires hours of configuration and JavaScript fatigue, even for quick prototyping.Current developer tools are separated into specialized cases and do not offer cross-utilization.React applications have grown to have up to thousands of components, making component management nearly prohibitive.Long component chains make state flow difficult to follow and debug.
We started on a journey to address these pain points so that developers can get back to the business of coding.
We are thrilled to introduce the world’s first dedicated IDE for React web development — Reactide.
An Extensible Developer Environment in a Single Click
Reactide is a cross-platform desktop application that offers a custom simulator, making build-tool and server configuration unnecessary. This brings development back to the days where opening a single file instantly renders the project in the browser. Now developers can achieve the same simplicity with a single React JSX file while still utilizing the power of React.
Navigable, Editable, Live Visualization
We are also excited to announce an innovative visualization tool that allows developers to navigate and edit code live via Reactide’s custom-built component tree renderer. This makes managing state flow visual, direct and, most of all, intuitive.
Synchronized Properties
To accelerate the React development flow even further, Reactide offers synchronous GUI controls of component properties and styles. The cumbersome process of having to wait and transpile every minor edit to a project, is now instant.
It has been a long journey, and the team behind Reactide 3.0 — Juan Hart, Khalid Umar, Rocky Liao and myself — are finally pleased to call for beta testers after our deployment. Reactide will be available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.