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.
React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
11–20 of 258 posts
Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
#12To me this epitomizes what I feel as I'm trying to explore options for different front-end frameworks. In this article I'm 30 screens down (literally 30 page down presses) and it's not even finished setting up the environment and dependencies. Sure, this is something that you only do once, so if it then leads to much better development workflow it makes sense to have a solid investment upfront, but it makes it very h…
>I'm 30 screens down (literally 30 page down presses)
If this web page were a book it would be about 30 pages.
What framework is there that allows you to build full scale web-apps in less time?
Certainly not Angular, an Angular tutorial would be at least twice as long and you wouldn't even use half the features of Angular.
Meteor? Sure, but meteor isn't a good choice for people who need a lot of control of what's going on under the hood.
Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
#13To me this epitomizes what I feel as I'm trying to explore options for different front-end frameworks. In this article I'm 30 screens down (literally 30 page down presses) and it's not even finished setting up the environment and dependencies. Sure, this is something that you only do once, so if it then leads to much better development workflow it makes sense to have a solid investment upfront, but it makes it very h…
I've shared your frustration. The Hello World experience is a huge spectrum ranging from the 30 screens of setup you describe to the one-click Visual Studio installer.
The other thing to consider is what you assume from a reader in a tutorial. If you assume they have a full environment setup (or will be following another tutorial), you can put together a much more concise article.
Imagine the now-classic Rails Blog in 15 minutes screencast. For those at home -- even if you assume a unix-y environment -- you might have tutorial setup that looks like this:
* Install homebrew/update package manager
* Install ruby-build
* Install rbenv
* Install ruby-2.3
* Install git
* Create a git repository
* Install bundler
* Create a Gemfile that includes rails
* bundle install
* Install rails
* Install postgres via homebrew
* Setup postgres database
* Install javascript runtime (nodejs or ruby-racer)
* finally run `rails s` to see the blank hello world page
Sometimes there are a lot of steps involved in a full end-to-end guide. And sometimes we forget all the baked in knowledge and setup we had to do for our preferred tools/stacks that we are having to go through again as part of learning a new technology.
Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
#14This 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.
React 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.
Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
#15This 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.
I 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.?
Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
#16Am I the only person who just doesn't get the appeal of Webpack over using something like Gulp? It just seems to me like Gulp is so much easier to use and setup.
Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely agreed. I had the same frustrations when I was looking at things like meteor, angular, etc and I definitely got that vibe when I saw this page. And I am saying that as someone who has already built websites with React. I really don't know that it needs to be (or feel) this complicated If it's a React tutorial it shouldn't require people to navigate through Karma, Webpack and Postcss, not least of all becau…
> the same frustrations when I was looking at things like meteor The main strength of Meteor is the speed you can get up and running $ meteor create my-app-name $ meteor npm install $ meteor will set you up with a full stack application, running locally, with zero config
The thing is with Meteor I feel like I have to learn ALL of meteor to really expand/extend upon what it gives me or use some plugin, it feels like it takes away way too much control for me.
With Angular I feel like I have to re-learn web development and do everything the "angular way", and who knows when Angular three comes out and the "Angular way" completely changes.
With React, I can learn a small framework that's highly extensible and basically pure javascript. I don't feel like I have to re-learn everything I know about web-dev when using react like I do with Angular.
Angular and Meteor try to do too much, this is why react is winning the framework wars.
Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
#18To me this epitomizes what I feel as I'm trying to explore options for different front-end frameworks. In this article I'm 30 screens down (literally 30 page down presses) and it's not even finished setting up the environment and dependencies. Sure, this is something that you only do once, so if it then leads to much better development workflow it makes sense to have a solid investment upfront, but it makes it very h…
I've shared your frustration. The Hello World experience is a huge spectrum ranging from the 30 screens of setup you describe to the one-click Visual Studio installer. The other thing to consider is what you assume from a reader in a tutorial. If you assume they have a full environment setup (or will be following another tutorial), you can put together a much more concise article. Imagine the now-classic Rails Blog i…
But wouldn't it just be:
* install rails
* run 'rails s'
Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
#19The setup required just to get a production-ready idiomatic `hello world` app in React is downright insane. Without the Facebook name behind it, I don't see how React could have ever made it this far. Foolish of me to keep underestimating the pains that JS developers willingly tolerate.
The problem is that there isn’t really such a thing as an “idiomatic React app”. React is just a view-rendering layer with a small API. You have to put together all the other pieces of your application stack…
Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
#20Am I the only person who just doesn't get the appeal of Webpack over using something like Gulp? It just seems to me like Gulp is so much easier to use and setup.
Webpack does a lot more. Gulp is just a glorified (and cross-platform) make.