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Hi, I'm one of the devs on this team. Let me know if you have any questions. It's a super awesome feeling to have open sourced this after working on it for mon

Hi, I'm one of the devs on this team. Let me know if you have any questions. It's a super awesome feeling to have open sourced this after working on it for months, and I think we've done some interesting things. So I want to share our ideas and opinions. I'm hoping to publish more about them in the coming weeks.

kkirsche 10y ago
Thanks for open sourcing this. I know that can be hard to get through legal and can be something that is hard for people. Great to see this!
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  It's dead easy to open source stuff at CloudFlare. We have an internal mailing list. Email was sent on March 11, 2016 requesting this. Everyone signed off (including legal) that day.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    Why the quarter delay in making the source available?
    - jgrahamc 10y ago
      We were busy doing other stuff.
      - thejameskyle 10y ago
        Heh, yeaah boss. OBVIOUSLY I do TONS of things. Where would I even begin to talk about all the things I do? There's just so many! No time to open source something with all the things I definitely do... closes 30 browser tabs
    - thejameskyle 10y ago
      Thats about how long it takes me to write a blog post :P Also I was trying to get a number of things in a good place, like https://lernajs.io/ https://lernajs.io/
- thejameskyle 10y ago
  CloudFlare was actually very encouraging. I emailed our internal open source legal mailing list and had responses from our CEO and Head of Product Strategy within 5 mins that were really excited about it. There was a brief concern about phishing, but that was quickly resolved. It was more difficult writing the blog post than getting legal's approval :P
  - jgrahamc 10y ago
    Now, I'm hurt, James. I replied From: John Graham-Cumming Subject: Re: open sourcing cf-ui Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2016 07:15:56 +0000 This is fantastic! I am really happy to see open source stuff from www and would love to see this open sourced soon with a nice blog post describing why we wrote this, what the transition was like, what the components do. We've done a tremendous amount of blogging and open sourcing of systems level stuff and it's great that we can do the same here. Super to showcase all our technology. Really nice. But, oh, those guys reply and that's what you remember? :-)
    - thejameskyle 10y ago
      You weren't in that 5 min cutoff. And no excuses about being on the other side of the world
  - kkirsche 10y ago
    Wow, I'm jealous. Every time I've tried to get stuff open sourced at the company I'm with I get blocked by legal usually they just don't get what the technology is, like kernel bypass PF_RING network processor :( one day. Glad to hear you had a good experience though
    - thejameskyle 10y ago
      It may be that our legal counsel is too busy making dad jokes to care about me open sourcing some JavaScript.
      - 10y ago
Joeri 10y ago
I couldn't figure out from the blog post why you switched from backbone to react. Could you talk a bit about the reasons?
- thejameskyle 10y ago
  I left them out because many others have blogged about the same reasons. But this is the biggest reason: We have a lot of complexity in our view/component layer where we trying to bring simple workflows to very complicated technical features. Backbone (even with Marionette) doesn't have a strong view composition story, essentially avoiding setting up any patterns. React's composition pattern is so strong that its hard not to abstract things. The complexity is still there but its easy to follow and extremely simple to test (especially with redux). There are more reasons, but I have to go now. Hopefully that suffices
- bzalasky 10y ago
  With regard to adopting React, coming from Backbone in the past. I've found that it simplifies the view layer, particularly when it comes to extracting shared functionality. It's not to say that you can't do this in a Backbone application, far from it. However, it's less work in a React application because of how React enables composition. There were two primary drivers the led me to adopt Redux. 1) When working with multiple services to build a single view, Backbone models are the wrong abstraction. Redux allows you to work with arbitrary data structures without the need to deal with hooking up events between nested models/collections. It also prevents overfetching or having to resort to nested models when a single endpoint serves multiple views. 2) Managing complex asynchronous flows becomes easier when there's a single source of truth. The backends for frontends pattern that Netflix and Thoughtworks have written about is another approach to dealing with the multiple services issue, but in reality, it's not an option for every project.
minaguib 10y ago
The demo page causes a crash and reload loop on Safari iPhone iOS 9.3.2

kkirsche 10y ago

Thanks for open sourcing this. I know that can be hard to get through legal and can be something that is hard for people. Great to see this!

jgrahamc 10y ago
It's dead easy to open source stuff at CloudFlare. We have an internal mailing list. Email was sent on March 11, 2016 requesting this. Everyone signed off (including legal) that day.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  Why the quarter delay in making the source available?
  - jgrahamc 10y ago
    We were busy doing other stuff.
    - thejameskyle 10y ago
      Heh, yeaah boss. OBVIOUSLY I do TONS of things. Where would I even begin to talk about all the things I do? There's just so many! No time to open source something with all the things I definitely do... closes 30 browser tabs
  - thejameskyle 10y ago
    Thats about how long it takes me to write a blog post :P Also I was trying to get a number of things in a good place, like https://lernajs.io/ https://lernajs.io/
thejameskyle 10y ago
CloudFlare was actually very encouraging. I emailed our internal open source legal mailing list and had responses from our CEO and Head of Product Strategy within 5 mins that were really excited about it. There was a brief concern about phishing, but that was quickly resolved. It was more difficult writing the blog post than getting legal's approval :P
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  Now, I'm hurt, James. I replied From: John Graham-Cumming Subject: Re: open sourcing cf-ui Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2016 07:15:56 +0000 This is fantastic! I am really happy to see open source stuff from www and would love to see this open sourced soon with a nice blog post describing why we wrote this, what the transition was like, what the components do. We've done a tremendous amount of blogging and open sourcing of systems level stuff and it's great that we can do the same here. Super to showcase all our technology. Really nice. But, oh, those guys reply and that's what you remember? :-)
  - thejameskyle 10y ago
    You weren't in that 5 min cutoff. And no excuses about being on the other side of the world
- kkirsche 10y ago
  Wow, I'm jealous. Every time I've tried to get stuff open sourced at the company I'm with I get blocked by legal usually they just don't get what the technology is, like kernel bypass PF_RING network processor :( one day. Glad to hear you had a good experience though
  - thejameskyle 10y ago
    It may be that our legal counsel is too busy making dad jokes to care about me open sourcing some JavaScript.
    - 10y ago

Joeri 10y ago

I couldn't figure out from the blog post why you switched from backbone to react. Could you talk a bit about the reasons?

thejameskyle 10y ago
I left them out because many others have blogged about the same reasons. But this is the biggest reason: We have a lot of complexity in our view/component layer where we trying to bring simple workflows to very complicated technical features. Backbone (even with Marionette) doesn't have a strong view composition story, essentially avoiding setting up any patterns. React's composition pattern is so strong that its hard not to abstract things. The complexity is still there but its easy to follow and extremely simple to test (especially with redux). There are more reasons, but I have to go now. Hopefully that suffices
bzalasky 10y ago
With regard to adopting React, coming from Backbone in the past. I've found that it simplifies the view layer, particularly when it comes to extracting shared functionality. It's not to say that you can't do this in a Backbone application, far from it. However, it's less work in a React application because of how React enables composition. There were two primary drivers the led me to adopt Redux. 1) When working with multiple services to build a single view, Backbone models are the wrong abstraction. Redux allows you to work with arbitrary data structures without the need to deal with hooking up events between nested models/collections. It also prevents overfetching or having to resort to nested models when a single endpoint serves multiple views. 2) Managing complex asynchronous flows becomes easier when there's a single source of truth. The backends for frontends pattern that Netflix and Thoughtworks have written about is another approach to dealing with the multiple services issue, but in reality, it's not an option for every project.

minaguib 10y ago

The demo page causes a crash and reload loop on Safari iPhone iOS 9.3.2