Migrating JavaScript React App to TypeScript

Featured image of Yumasoft article on migrating JavaScript to TypeScript

In one of our biggest projects, we develop and maintain a React web application. Last year, we decided to migrate it to TypeScript. How did it go? How did we migrate JavaScript to TypeScript? Was it worth it? What struggles we met and are we still having any issues? I’ll try to address these questions in this article.

Disclaimer: I’m not describing the migration process step-by-step or TypeScript itself in this article. You can find many resources on that online, including official TS docs.

How to Use JavaScript Component in React Component

We recently run into a problem of having to display a vanilla JavaScript component in a React component. This component exposes a static method to render itself, like many of pure JS components do. In a “normal” JavaScript context it would be very easy to just call such a method, providing a DOM element to render itself into. However, when you want to render such a document as a part of your React component, this becomes a bit tricky. Read on to see how we solved this issue.