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To jumpstart our project and avoid having to write everything from scratch, we found a bootstrapped project that came with the general look and feel we want for Manifold (minus the functionality of course). CoreUI is a free template for a general use, admin style web app. It comes written using many different options of JavaScript framework libraries, such as React.js, Angular 2+, Vue.js, and Angular. We decided to use React.js to take advantage of React Fiber (React v. 16.0.0), which has high speed and performance. There is no other real reason for why the other options would not have worked, (except Angular 1, which is deprecated). Here is the github repository for CoreUI: https://github.com/coreui/coreui-free-bootstrap-admin-template.

Create React App

One extremely important thing to realize is that CoreUI used another repository called Create React App, which is a boilerplate for React apps developed by Facebook. The README.md file is largely made up of the Create React App README.md. Create React App provides many different functionalities, including the Jest component tester and babel by default. Even though we cloned the repository some time ago, the README.md contains information on how to update our existing project to current versions of Create React App, which essentially updates all of our dependency tools without us having to do so.

React and Redux

For reference, here is the React website: https://reactjs.org/, and the Redux website: https://redux.js.org/.

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