A tiny weather app
🚀 Demo ● 📊 Results

This is a simple weather app, built in React (as well as also 10 other frontend frameworks) in order to review, compare and benchmark frontend web frameworks.

• 🌦️ Live weather conditions
• 📅 7-day weather forecast
• 🔍 City search functionality
• 📍 Geolocation support
• 💾 Persistent location storage
• 📱 Responsive design
• ♿ Accessible interface
• 🎨 Multi-theme support
• 🧪 Fully unit tested
• 🌐 Internationalized

Task	Status
Test - Executes all e2e and unit tests
Lint - Verifies code style and quality
Build - Builds and deploys the app

First, follow the repo setup instructions. Then cd apps/react and use the following commands:

npm run dev    # Start dev server (vite)
npm test       # Run tests
npm run lint   # Run lint checks
npm build      # Build for production (vite build)
npm start      # Serve built prod app (from ./dist)

For troubleshooting, use npm run verify from the root of the project.

The useWeatherData custom hook encapsulates all weather-related state and logic, demonstrating React's hooks pattern for reusable stateful logic.

The app includes an ErrorBoundary component using class-based lifecycle methods to catch JavaScript errors anywhere in the component tree.

Extensive use of useCallback for memoizing functions and useEffect with proper dependency arrays to prevent unnecessary re-renders and infinite loops.

React's conditional rendering using logical operators (&&) and ternary expressions for showing loading states, errors, and weather content based on application state.

All components are functional components using hooks, showcasing modern React patterns over legacy class-based components.

React is the most popular frontend library, created by Facebook in 2013. It popularised the component model and virtual DOM, changing frontend forever. Its ecosystem is massive, with libraries for everything. The downside is that it’s just a view layer, so you end up wiring lots of pieces together. Still, it runs huge apps like Facebook, Instagram and Netflix.

React is everywhere, powering millions of websites and used by every major tech company. It's been around for over 12 years, and both React and its tooling are incredibly mature. There's a reason it became the default choice for so many teams - the ecosystem is massive, jobs are plentiful, and you can build basically anything.

But it's not perfect. Our weather app showcases both React's strengths and frustrations. The component model is elegant, useState and useEffect work fine for simple state, and the custom useWeatherData hook abstracts the weather logic nicely. But you're constantly thinking about re-renders, dependency arrays, and manual memoization.

The virtual DOM adds overhead that other frameworks avoid entirely. Need to optimize performance? Time to sprinkle React.memo, useCallback, and useMemo everywhere. Coming from Svelte or Solid, all this manual work feels tedious. But the developer tooling is exceptional and the community support is unmatched.

The JSX syntax is familiar once you get used to the quirks - className instead of class, self-closing tags, and JavaScript expressions in curly braces. Controlled components with value and onChange work well for forms, though they're more verbose than Vue's v-model.

React really shines for complex applications where the ecosystem matters. We didn't need Redux, React Query, or code splitting for this simple weather app, but for something like Web Check, these tools become essential. The flexibility to choose your own architecture is both React's blessing and curse.

Since the weather app is very simple, it may be helpful to see a more practical implementation of a React app. So, checkout:

Web Check - All-in-one OSINT tool for analyzing any site
🐙 Get it on GitHub at github.com/Lissy93/web-check
🌐 View the website at web-check.xyz

Weather-Front is licensed under MIT © Alicia Sykes 2025.
View Attributions for credits, thanks and contributors.