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This genuinely made me feel ill. The author has done a tremendous service to others - clearly and patiently listing the thousands of steps required to get a bas
by pjs_ 10y ago
This genuinely made me feel ill. The author has done a tremendous service to others - clearly and patiently listing the thousands of steps required to get a basic modern web app up and running. I agree with others that it is often difficult to find all the steps for a process like this in one place. At the same time, this is completely, totally fucking insane.
- ryanSrich 10y agoReact was built by Facebook. Facebook has 1 billion users. If you're looking to build a fast, simple, web app look at rails or Phoenix, not React.
- zxcvcxz 10y agoWhat's wrong with react? If it's good enough for facebook and good enough for the hundreds of other high traffic sites, then it's good enough for me. Of course I also like to stay employed and react is the most in demand framework right now.
- ryanSrich 10y agoSorry, I should have been more clear. What I meant was that your web app will never be as complex and resource demanding as Facebook. The reason why React is so complex is because it's intended for complex systems. If you want to quickly build a one off web app you shouldn't be using React imo. The length and complexity of this tutorial is a testament to that.
- lopatin 10y agoReact is simple, not complex. Simplicity is like the main benefit of using React if your intention is to build a single page app. If that's not what you need, then yeah, use Rails.
- ryanSrich 10y agoReact in a vacuum might be. React in the context of building a real application is not.
- lopatin 10y agoVacuum React is all you need for a small scale, real world app. Ok, granted at some point you might want to pass your build through Browserify and Babel. No worries, both of those things are one liners in bash. On the other hand, if you spend most of your time trying to make your build process the holy grail of hot-reloading webpack ES2020 isomorphic madness then you're not going to get much real work done. No one told you to do that though, and you can't blame React either. But even that isn't complexity. It's just annoying setup stuff. Real complexity grows with the scope of your app.
- zxcvcxz 10y agoI disagree. React it's self is very simple. It's web development that is complicated. Other frameworks that try to do everything like angular are also complicated for the developers. The frameworks that do everything and are easy to use (like meteor) don't offer the extensibility of the more bare bones frameworks. Any web site that wants to grow needs a full control of the stack. Of course, if all you're building is a static web page then I can see just using some HTML and CSS. But if you want to work professionally as a web developer then you need to know javascript and at least one major framework. You can not stay employed as a "full stack dev" if all you do is write an a couple HTML and CSS files and serve them with python httpSimpleServer.
- 8note 10y agoReact is complex because there are realms of new things you can do with it that you couldnt do before in a web app, and the best version hasnt been found yet.
- ocean3 10y agoReact is just for view layer. Its not much complex. Its simple enough to add to normal pages let alone SPA.
- ctvo 10y agoReact itself is a view library with a very small learning curve and narrow API. You can view all the documentation on their website. It's about 5 pages. This has nothing to do with Facebook's scale and Facebook didn't design this complexity. Webpack isn't React, Redux isn't React, ES2015 isn't React. They're commonly used with React and add complexity to both your architecture and build step, but you're not required to use them. This tutorial is getting a lot of negative replies because it's a tutorial on all those other things in addition to React. It takes 90 pages before you write React code because the author spent a lot of it explaining how Webpack configurations work.
- saiprashanth93 10y agoAre you trying to say that if you are building a simple web app you should be building a server-side rendered web app using Rails/Phoenix?
- firasd 10y agoI feel this way about Node and React sometimes but I'm not sure other environments are necessarily better. In a way the fact that you can do all this in a bunch of text files is pretty elegant. Is installing and configuring Apache and PHP with a bunch of modules that much easier, or does it only appear easier because of apt-get, a2enmod, etc.?
- sotojuan 10y agoI'm interested about why you mentioned Node—aside from the occasional silliness of npm I find it easy and quick with minimal to no boilerplate.
- firasd 10y agoWhat people refer to as boilerplate for setting up React, including in this article, is about installing and configuring node modules, build systems and other tools. React itself is just two modules (React, React-DOM.)
- sotojuan 10y agoGot it. Thought you meant just Node. Thanks for clearing it up.
- pbreit 10y agoShouldn't stuff like this be as easy as cloning a bootstrap, npm install and go? I'm an acknowledged novice but I find "modern" web development to be completely insane.
- ocean3 10y agoYou don't need all of them to create a modern js app. I use just browserify and watchify with node scripts under package.json. Simple to copy and modify for new projects.