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Cool tutorial, but first check if React is what you really need for your next thing. Facebook creates React to solve the problem of dealing with large applicati

Cool tutorial, but first check if React is what you really need for your next thing. Facebook creates React to solve the problem of dealing with large applications with data that changes overtime. React became very popular to the point where the word gets spread saying this is the newest and coolest thing to learn. At this point the core idea and key aspects of why React is cool get misunderstood and we start assuming that React is the best choice for everything! and Virtual DOM is so cool and done!. So now apps that could be done in 1/3 of the time if you just used a simpler library or even vanilla Javascript are being written with all these complex flows, dispatching actions and thunking async operations when all you really needed was display a list of things with ajax...... I'm not saying React is not cool. I'm just saying, understand why React is relevant today and decide if its the right thing for you project. Of course these tutorials are gonna be using simple examples that are unrealistic. They're meant to help you understand how things connect with each other, but are you building a project that is worthy of all this setup?.

zxcvcxz 10y ago
The cool thing about react is that it doesn't try to do everything. Compared to Angular react is minimalist. So that's why react is used so much: because it doesn't try to do everything, it's basically just javascript and doesn't require you to re-learn web dev, and if you want to extend it you can easily do that. React can be made to fit most needs. If all you're doing is serving a static web page then any framework is over kill, but then again, if all you're doing is serving static web pages you probably aren't a paid professional web developer. To be a web dev professionally you need to know some framework, and react is really the best one. Angular tries to do too much but still makes you implement everything "the angular way" and meteor isn't a good framework for companies that want mix and match different technologies on their stack. Then there are other alternatives that are non-javascript based, but in the end you still end up having to use javascript somewhere most of the time. Why take all the nastiness from the web-dev world and add even more convolution to it? React isn't perfect but it's the best we have. And this is coming from someone who hates facebook and was once an angular dev.
- marknutter 10y ago
  But React does actually try to do everything. React components can only compose other React components, and so you have React components all the way down. And if passing data all the way down that tree gets tedious you need to start looking into some sort of Flux/Redux type of data handling solution. Pretty soon you're in-lining your CSS because half the tutorials and 3rd party React components are doing that and nothing you've written plays well with any of your existing code, not to mention the vast sea of code written using other libraries. React is a trap. It works best when you use it everywhere, as Facebook does, but it's not a friendly and open framework when it comes to compatibility with others, especially with coming standards like Web Components.
firasd 10y ago
I'm not sure about "large applications", but agreed about "data that changes". It's definitely not like dropping in a library like jQuery to spice up some interactions on a webpage. I wrote something about the 'Why' of React (with some related links that talk more about it): "Interface from Data... Rendering views as a function of state." https://medium.com/@firasd/interface-from-data-using-react-to-sync-updates-and-offline-activity-across-devices-f672b213701c https://medium.com/@firasd/interface-from-data-using-react-t...

zxcvcxz 10y ago

The cool thing about react is that it doesn't try to do everything. Compared to Angular react is minimalist. So that's why react is used so much: because it doesn't try to do everything, it's basically just javascript and doesn't require you to re-learn web dev, and if you want to extend it you can easily do that. React can be made to fit most needs. If all you're doing is serving a static web page then any framework is over kill, but then again, if all you're doing is serving static web pages you probably aren't a paid professional web developer. To be a web dev professionally you need to know some framework, and react is really the best one. Angular tries to do too much but still makes you implement everything "the angular way" and meteor isn't a good framework for companies that want mix and match different technologies on their stack. Then there are other alternatives that are non-javascript based, but in the end you still end up having to use javascript somewhere most of the time. Why take all the nastiness from the web-dev world and add even more convolution to it? React isn't perfect but it's the best we have. And this is coming from someone who hates facebook and was once an angular dev.

marknutter 10y ago
But React does actually try to do everything. React components can only compose other React components, and so you have React components all the way down. And if passing data all the way down that tree gets tedious you need to start looking into some sort of Flux/Redux type of data handling solution. Pretty soon you're in-lining your CSS because half the tutorials and 3rd party React components are doing that and nothing you've written plays well with any of your existing code, not to mention the vast sea of code written using other libraries. React is a trap. It works best when you use it everywhere, as Facebook does, but it's not a friendly and open framework when it comes to compatibility with others, especially with coming standards like Web Components.

firasd 10y ago

I'm not sure about "large applications", but agreed about "data that changes". It's definitely not like dropping in a library like jQuery to spice up some interactions on a webpage. I wrote something about the 'Why' of React (with some related links that talk more about it): "Interface from Data... Rendering views as a function of state." https://medium.com/@firasd/interface-from-data-using-react-to-sync-updates-and-offline-activity-across-devices-f672b213701c https://medium.com/@firasd/interface-from-data-using-react-t...