Using React for Web-Based Graphical User Applications for Accelerator Controls

Today, control applications need to run on a variety of different operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, but also Android and iOS. Programming languages like Java have tried to solve this problem in the past by providing a common runtime environment. However, this approach is insufficient or even unavailable for mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Another problem is the different form factors of mobile and desktop devices, which makes it difficult to develop portable applications.One way out of this dilemma is to use standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript) to implement applications that run in the browser, which is available for all platforms. Modern JavaScript web application frame- works combined with JavaScript graphics libraries such as D3 are suitable for building both very simple and very complex web-based graphical user applications. This paper reports on the status and issues that we encountered in our current developments with React.