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As someone who works a lot with React — and have previously worked with things like Rails and Backbone — I adamantly disagree that the benefits are trivial or t

As someone who works a lot with React — and have previously worked with things like Rails and Backbone — I adamantly disagree that the benefits are trivial or that it's more complicated. The functional component architecture makes it considerably easier to create less buggy UIs with less messy codebases. You sound like you don't really know or understand React. Which is fine, but it doesn't put you in a good position to criticize it intelligently. React isn't popular because of any kind of echo chamber phenomenon. It's popular because of its design; it managed hit a particular very sweet spot combining the various principles of composition, modularity, functional purity and internally consistent state management. I do agree that web apps aren't as good as desktop apps. But that's not the fault of SPAs.

SnowingXIV 10y ago
I feel I'm in the same camp as the comment you're responding to, so I do want to chime in. Most of the applications I've had to develop require a database of some sort, rails makes this incredibly easy to do. I can simply generate a model and migrate. There are very few applications (that I've needed to develop) that don't require a reliable database. This is where I've yet been able to truly utilize anything like react, vue, etc. The best situations been some form storing json data objects but that's not scalable and I rather be able to backup a sql database to query from (especially with thousands of records). And I know facebook uses it and has one the biggest databases on the planet but I'm talking about easy of use in spinning up full stack applications as a small shop and understand what's going on. I know you can use react on top of rails (with postgres, mysql, etc), but then I start feeling too many weird abstractions going on and have a hard time following the bouncing ball. React claims to be just the V part of MVC which is fine, but when I'm trying to quickly build up a full stack application rails just felt the simplest way to do so. Bringing this up not because I think there is anything wrong with React and I know they are solving a pure front end problem, but this is more of a question to what's the most elegant full stack solution that would be comparable to RoR solution with any of these new hot js frameworks? If there is I think I'd be more than happy to startup some projects that way.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Easy: Write your backend as an API, and let the UI be a thin client that talks to it. You can write your backend in Rails (or Sinatra, which we've used a lot) and use the same workflows to wire up models and so forth. I wouldn't want to write database stuff in JavaScript. The frameworks are all terrible. Nobody has managed to replicate the ActiveRecord story for Node.js. Except for legacy stuff (which use Ruby + Sinatra), we write our backends in Go. But that might not be your cup of tea.
mattmanser 10y ago
We must just make different types of apps. I work on a couple of startups at the moment, one of which that has an admin interface in a SPA, one doesn't. I can throw in new reports, functionality, etc. in the non-SPA one with less than 1/2 day's worth of work, sometimes even in minutes. The SPA one takes days to do similar functionality. It's just all so bloody complicated getting it working together. Make a new end point, create a new DTO, make sure you're not leaking anything from the end-point, duplicate validation logic, wire up view models, have it not work completely for an hour or two of debugging because you forget to add one line to some gulp file or something equally ridiculous. And then you throw in something like React and they want you to do it X way with Y thinking and Z plugin doesn't like you're returning the wrong content type or data structure or something but doesn't throw an error about it, logs it as some sort of warning, or if there is an error it's deep in the guts of 10 nested 1 line self-referential call in the library. It just adds so many moving parts, functionality ends up sprawled over 10 different files, it's hard to grok or reason about, hard to know if you've done everything you need to. I find it simply unpleasant to work in that way. I just want to write the UI and the logic and be gone, not dealing with frameworks barfing out bizarre warnings or mysteriously broken builds. Actually, nothing fills me with more dread in a SPA than when I click a button or something and nothing happens. The worst problem programming in SPAs is when things simply just don't work and there's no error at all because you didn't quite invoke the magic framework in quite the correct way. Yay SPAs.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Having done both classical Rails apps and React, I still disagree that the classical way is somehow superior. You still have to do the same amount of work — wire up models, routes and such. There are annoyances — occasionally we have to wrestle with NPM (though now that we use Yarn, the problems are generally gone), low-quality third-party libs, browser compatibility issues, etc. But it's just exchanging one set of problems for another. The React world isn't any worse than the Rails world there. I get that some people get JavaScript fatigue and don't understand/are able to keep up with the new technologies. For those of us who are comfortable with the React way of doing things, it's fantastic. I have no difficulties reasoning about the code, nor with correctly organizing code into separate files (you don't always need "10 different files"; you have a choice!). React + WebPack + NPM modules beats the old way by a mile; I couldn't be happier. I have things to complain about, to be sure, but they're less about frameworks and more about the challenges that arise in a browser-based environment. Again, a different set of problems. > Actually, nothing fills me with more dread in a SPA than when I click a button or something and nothing happens. Something is definitely wrong here. This is not a problem I've ever had.

SnowingXIV 10y ago

I feel I'm in the same camp as the comment you're responding to, so I do want to chime in. Most of the applications I've had to develop require a database of some sort, rails makes this incredibly easy to do. I can simply generate a model and migrate. There are very few applications (that I've needed to develop) that don't require a reliable database. This is where I've yet been able to truly utilize anything like react, vue, etc. The best situations been some form storing json data objects but that's not scalable and I rather be able to backup a sql database to query from (especially with thousands of records). And I know facebook uses it and has one the biggest databases on the planet but I'm talking about easy of use in spinning up full stack applications as a small shop and understand what's going on. I know you can use react on top of rails (with postgres, mysql, etc), but then I start feeling too many weird abstractions going on and have a hard time following the bouncing ball. React claims to be just the V part of MVC which is fine, but when I'm trying to quickly build up a full stack application rails just felt the simplest way to do so. Bringing this up not because I think there is anything wrong with React and I know they are solving a pure front end problem, but this is more of a question to what's the most elegant full stack solution that would be comparable to RoR solution with any of these new hot js frameworks? If there is I think I'd be more than happy to startup some projects that way.

lobster_johnson 10y ago
Easy: Write your backend as an API, and let the UI be a thin client that talks to it. You can write your backend in Rails (or Sinatra, which we've used a lot) and use the same workflows to wire up models and so forth. I wouldn't want to write database stuff in JavaScript. The frameworks are all terrible. Nobody has managed to replicate the ActiveRecord story for Node.js. Except for legacy stuff (which use Ruby + Sinatra), we write our backends in Go. But that might not be your cup of tea.

mattmanser 10y ago

We must just make different types of apps. I work on a couple of startups at the moment, one of which that has an admin interface in a SPA, one doesn't. I can throw in new reports, functionality, etc. in the non-SPA one with less than 1/2 day's worth of work, sometimes even in minutes. The SPA one takes days to do similar functionality. It's just all so bloody complicated getting it working together. Make a new end point, create a new DTO, make sure you're not leaking anything from the end-point, duplicate validation logic, wire up view models, have it not work completely for an hour or two of debugging because you forget to add one line to some gulp file or something equally ridiculous. And then you throw in something like React and they want you to do it X way with Y thinking and Z plugin doesn't like you're returning the wrong content type or data structure or something but doesn't throw an error about it, logs it as some sort of warning, or if there is an error it's deep in the guts of 10 nested 1 line self-referential call in the library. It just adds so many moving parts, functionality ends up sprawled over 10 different files, it's hard to grok or reason about, hard to know if you've done everything you need to. I find it simply unpleasant to work in that way. I just want to write the UI and the logic and be gone, not dealing with frameworks barfing out bizarre warnings or mysteriously broken builds. Actually, nothing fills me with more dread in a SPA than when I click a button or something and nothing happens. The worst problem programming in SPAs is when things simply just don't work and there's no error at all because you didn't quite invoke the magic framework in quite the correct way. Yay SPAs.

lobster_johnson 10y ago
Having done both classical Rails apps and React, I still disagree that the classical way is somehow superior. You still have to do the same amount of work — wire up models, routes and such. There are annoyances — occasionally we have to wrestle with NPM (though now that we use Yarn, the problems are generally gone), low-quality third-party libs, browser compatibility issues, etc. But it's just exchanging one set of problems for another. The React world isn't any worse than the Rails world there. I get that some people get JavaScript fatigue and don't understand/are able to keep up with the new technologies. For those of us who are comfortable with the React way of doing things, it's fantastic. I have no difficulties reasoning about the code, nor with correctly organizing code into separate files (you don't always need "10 different files"; you have a choice!). React + WebPack + NPM modules beats the old way by a mile; I couldn't be happier. I have things to complain about, to be sure, but they're less about frameworks and more about the challenges that arise in a browser-based environment. Again, a different set of problems. > Actually, nothing fills me with more dread in a SPA than when I click a button or something and nothing happens. Something is definitely wrong here. This is not a problem I've ever had.