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Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

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Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#3

Post by WalterSear »

xuejie wrote: post #2

https://github.com/Jon-Biz/simple-static-react-firebase/blob... Sorry, but with those many dependencies, I could hardly call that minimal.

The boilerplate you have to write (and handle) is minimal. This is more important to me than the number of packages I have to install for development.

And, only React, ReactDom and Firebase (which has to be required in the page html, unfortunately, due to Firebase issues) actually ship down to th client

While I can appreciate the benefit of keeping your entire codebase small (especially the bits that aren't yours), I'm not entirely certain of the wisdom of trying to build a react/es6/less/sass transpiling development environment with as few external dependencies as possible :)

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#5

Post by girvo »

xuejie wrote: post #2

https://github.com/Jon-Biz/simple-static-react-firebase/blob... Sorry, but with those many dependencies, I could hardly call that minimal.

Most of those should be "devDependencies", as they're used for build-tooling not for the actual codebase, but I'll be honest I'm right there with you: my major drama with modern front-end dev at the moment is the sheer amount of dependencies that are "required" in a traditional toolset.

That said, leveraging Browserify, Bubleify[0] and Ramda[1] alone can get you pretty far in a seriously maintainable way with modern code, which is super nice: keeps compile times stupid quick and reduces some of the cognitive overhead (and possible maintenance drama) that too many third-party deps introduce.

There's a balance to be struck here, and it's a hard problem, I think.

[0] https://github.com/garthenweb/bubleify

[1] http://ramdajs.com/0.21.0/index.html

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#6

Post by pietro »

chvid wrote: post #4
xuejie wrote: post #2

https://github.com/Jon-Biz/simple-static-react-firebase/blob... Sorry, but with those many dependencies, I could hardly call that minimal.

Should some of those not be dev-dependencies?

Yes, the ones related to Babel and Webpack.

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#7

Post by dvcrn »

Apologies for the question but what benefits do I get if I build on firebase?

From the people I talked to it seems that the main audience for firebase is mobile engineers that either don't have the skillset or the time to learn how to build a backend system. Most people I talked to also told me they wouldn't use firebase if they could build a backend.

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#9

Post by hiou »

dvcrn wrote: post #7

Apologies for the question but what benefits do I get if I build on firebase? From the people I talked to it seems that the main audience for firebase is mobile engineers that either don't have the skillset or the time to learn how to build a backend system. Most people I talked to also told me they wouldn't use firebase if they could build a backend.

With firebase you can just write a front-end single page app and never think about servers or anything like that. It takes seconds to start using and very little knowledge about how it works.
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