Getting started with React

Teaching frontend tools is not the objective of this book, but we need to build something useful to see how serverless deals with modern frontend development. We will use React here because it is currently one of the most popular tools. If you don't know what React is or how to use it, I'll guide you to understand the basic concepts.

React principles

The first thing you should note is that React is a library and not a framework. The difference is that a library provides a set of functionalities to solve a specific problem, and a framework provides a set of libraries centered on a particular methodology.

React is only responsible for of your application. That's the problem React solves. If you need to make Ajax calls or handle page routes, you need to add other libraries, you need to think about components. Your user interface is a composition of simple components, where each one of them has an inner state and an HTML definition. When using React, you don't manipulate...