In this chapter, we completed the MERN skeleton application by adding a working React frontend, including frontend routing and basic server-side rendering of the React views.
We started off by updating the development flow to include client-side code bundling for the React views. We updated configuration for Webpack and Babel to compile the React code and discussed how to load the configured Webpack middleware from the Express app to initiate server-side and client-side code compilation from one place during development.
With the development flow updated and before building out the frontend, we added the relevant React dependencies along with React Router for frontend routing and Material-UI to use their existing components in the skeleton app's user interface.
Then, we implemented the top-level root React components, and integrated React Router that allowed us to add client-side routes for navigation. Using these routes, we loaded the custom React components that we developed using...