Promoting portable components

When we know what to expect from our component properties, the context in which the component is used becomes less important. This means that as long as the component is able to validate its property values, it really shouldn't matter where the component is used; it could easily be used by any feature.

If you want a generic component that's portable across application features, you can either write component validation code or you can write defensive code that runs at render time. The challenge with programming defensively is that it dilutes the value of declarative React components. Using React-style property validation, you can avoid writing defensive code. Instead, the property validation mechanism emits a warning when something doesn't pass, informing you that you need to go fix something.

Note

Defensive code is code that needs to account for a number of edge cases during runtime, in a production environment. Coding defensively is necessary when potential problems...