We already had a handful of jQuery plugins we depended on, and we continued to use them
jQuery tangled in with react:
Hard to read and maintain code
Hard to ensure behavior is as expected
More complexity than needed
More code than needed in the components
We questioned the notion that jQuery and jQuery plugins saved us time
Convenient methods not related to the DOM in jQuery had to be replaced, es5/6 shims was the solution.
We use bootstrap 2.
Implementing bootstrap plugin code in react was straight forward
July 4th 2014
A little less than 5 months, most of the porting done in about one month.
Dropped libs and plugins, more reusable code
Wrote components to do exactly what we needed them to do, improving them further as needed.
API based backend
Fast and rich UI
Data caching in the client
Modularity
We could do SPA without react too, but it made the steps to actually do it easier.
Looked at react routers, wrote our own to get full control and use cases not covered in other libs