React architecture for a huge business application

There is absolutely no question that React/Redux can (and is widely) used to develop the kind of applications that you describe. Nothing in your description makes what you are building so unique that it excludes React as a platform for building it. We are actively working with a large enterprise customer who is building their entire front end - with 100 + SPA (Single page applications) in React. This is a team of over 100 developers over a 2-3 year project.

The way we structured this has been crucial -

First, you want to choose a UI component library. A few examples below :

• MaterialUI - https://github.com/callemall/material-ui
• React Strap - https://github.com/reactstrap/reactstrap
• React Bootstrap -https://github.com/react-bootstrap/react-bootstrap
• Khan Academy React Components https://github.com/Khan/react-components
• https://github.com/elementalui/elemental

We basically took one of these and built a component library off of them, because our components are very custom styled.

Second, we created a modular architecture, where each module (SPA) is an npm package with a main container component and redux store.

Finally, we have a central server package, where each of the modules is registered. The server package is responsible for authentication, authorization, logging, routing, etc.

The essence of this answer is not to advise on how to structure a large React application, but to let you know that React can be (and is being) used to develop applications similar to what you are describing.

I'm at the similar situation right now. I have a background in large desktop applications (ERP, LOB - WinForms, WPF) - 1000+ modules, very dynamic (more than 70% of the UI was generated by input data/configuration), adding new functionality was just about extending some configuration (without touching source code).

I'm deeply investigating current web technologies and I'm more and more convinced that React is not a good fit for that. React really shines in small/middle size applications where you (and other team members) develop every page/component 'manually' (not dynamically generated) and you want to have one global state. But it doesn't help you with building large scale application out of the box - it is only UI library (so no support for modules, routing, forms, binding, http requests, static typing (typescript), etc.) and to my surprise, there is no support for style shadowing/encapsulation (you have to integrate, for example, CSS Modules, by your own). And at the end, you have to constantly bother with libraries versioning (to make them always work together is truly time and energy consuming).

I have a great experience with Angular 2/4+ and I think, for now, it is the best technology for that kind of the applications (if you know WPF, it is very similar). It is a full framework, which is prepared to the scaling out of the box. You can split your app into independent modules (specifying which components will be visible to the outside world), every component has public api (statically typed, inputs/outputs) and encapsulated css styles (there is no interference between others). For the global state (logged in user, global configuration, etc.), you can still use library ngrx/store (which implements Redux pattern and comes with extra nice things, like 'effects' and integrates really well into Angular ecosystem).

I tried to do in Angular really crazy stuff (dynamically generating the whole application from backend configuration) and everything worked perfectly, as expected.

Getting started writing more complex apps in React can really be a struggle, I know exactly how it feels!

As you say, React is a UI lib and not an event framework. That's why you typically need a library to handle events, for example Redux. You clearly state that you decided not to use Redux (you even used capital letters for not :) ). I would take a step back if I were you and reconsider that decision. You say the reason for not using Redux is that your cannot keep your components easily pluggable and reusable when using Redux. I would argue that is not true. Redux is totally decoupled from your React components. Redux only handles receiving events, and managing state. From the React components point of view, it just receives data in props and sends events by calling regular functions. It's possible to still unit-tests, reuse, etc.

I would suggest you take another look at Redux with this in consideration. Happy to help if you have more questions!