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React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

fullstackreact.com

61–70 of 258 posts

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#61
The complexity of this tutorial reflects the current state of web app development more than the complexity of React. React by itself is actually rather simple on the surface.

Even though I don't need this tutorial to be productive, I think I'm going to go through it anyway to fill in holes in my knowledge. It looks well written.

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#62
post #48

I'm no Javascript Boilerplate Fatigue apologist, but there are many comments in here that are treating this as a "Learn how to use React" tutorial. This is not what is advertised nor the stated reason this article was written. From the first sentence: "we get a lot of questions about how to build large applications with React and how to integrate external APIs" Large application strucutre, external integrations...not…

The problem with the massive amount of churn is that it just doesn't pay off to learn the new, cool thing when it's going to be obsolete in 3 months or less. I think all programmers, especially ones who read HN, like to learn new things. It's fun to pick up new languages, learn new paradigms, and experiment with different technologies.

What's not fun is learning 10 different ways to handle promises, 4 different build tools, several frameworks, and dozens of new libraries over the course of a year just to keep up. By the time you reach a level of mastery over one of these tools, it's already been replaced by something else! I mean it's great that the tools are getting better, but it's really painful to deal with the constant churn.

/rant

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#63
post #5

The 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 way you're talking suggests you're not a JS developer, so I'm discounting your opinion on JS topics to zero.

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#64
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to React tutorials. Why waste so much time making the user set up a dev environment? Just give him/her a prebuilt and "black boxed" environment and get on with learning React (what they actually want to do). I've seen plenty of people give up because they couldn't get their webpack set up right. Also, for those making courses, consider just using browserify. It's much easier…

>>This is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to React tutorials. Why waste so much time making the user set up a dev environment? Just give him/her a prebuilt and "black boxed" environment and get on with learning React And yet one of the most common criticisms of Rails is that it's too black-box and has too much "magic." So you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Rails is the actual framework. I can see why someone would hate the magic happening under the hood when attempting to get something done in Rails. When it comes to React, we're talking about the dev environment. I would love never having to configure webpack by myself ever again. Something like the rails scaffolding command would be excellent for working on React apps. I believe Ember has ember-cli to do this.

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#65
post #3

To 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 not blaming react, everything else in the javascript space is just as bad right now. There's at least 4 different ways of loading modules (UMD, AMD, commonJS, es (babel) modules), 2 of which (require(), import .. from) are used within this example.

Personally, I got so frustrated with ever-increasing complexity of tools and growing networks of dependencies that whenever I can I try to package my JS code in self-contained modules/files that depend on nothing -- not even on one another. Needless to say, it's not an approach that's very popular, but it works remarkably well for websites of moderate complexity. One thing I'm sure of: using those modules feels far more satisfying than using a framework.

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#66
I haven't finished reading, but so far this is an excellent walkthrough. This goes far far FAR beyond the 'Hello World' and 'TodoApp' tutorials and demos the amount of tooling you have to dedicate to keep things as seamless as possible.

I recently wrote that in a side project it does not appear to be worth the effort, but that applies to my side project and nothing else. Your next project may well look a LOT like this.

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#67
post #46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really feel like this isn't a general problem, but rather a problem with a subset of development environments. Node (backend) definitely doesn't have a similar problem. Want an express app? Install node -> npm i express --save -> node app.js. Go doesn't have it either, whether you're using the base tool or GVM. Python requires a minuscule setup in virtualenv, but beyond that its straightforward. Elixir and Rust are…

To be fair, the parent to your comment included lots of steps that assumed the user was starting from scratch. If we assume the same for the user making an Express app, the steps are much more complex: * Install a C++ compiler (XCode or libssl-dev packages) * Run the NVM install script * Use NVM to install Node.js * npm install express-generator -g * express myapp * cd myapp; npm install * Install or update Homebrew…

Really? This steps you just listed are similarly complex to what's in that React article? No No bruh.... 30 screens -- down-button-presses down and we're still seting up for a frontend sample app. This is so so an issue, Node(backend), Go and Rails and Py aint got.

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#68
post #48

I'm no Javascript Boilerplate Fatigue apologist, but there are many comments in here that are treating this as a "Learn how to use React" tutorial. This is not what is advertised nor the stated reason this article was written. From the first sentence: "we get a lot of questions about how to build large applications with React and how to integrate external APIs" Large application strucutre, external integrations...not…

The problem with the massive amount of churn is that it just doesn't pay off to learn the new, cool thing when it's going to be obsolete in 3 months or less. I think all programmers, especially ones who read HN, like to learn new things. It's fun to pick up new languages, learn new paradigms, and experiment with different technologies. What's not fun is learning 10 different ways to handle promises, 4 different build…

Especially when even this article points out that webpack is difficult to set up, and basically requires a helper tool.

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#69
post #48

I'm no Javascript Boilerplate Fatigue apologist, but there are many comments in here that are treating this as a "Learn how to use React" tutorial. This is not what is advertised nor the stated reason this article was written. From the first sentence: "we get a lot of questions about how to build large applications with React and how to integrate external APIs" Large application strucutre, external integrations...not…

The problem with the massive amount of churn is that it just doesn't pay off to learn the new, cool thing when it's going to be obsolete in 3 months or less. I think all programmers, especially ones who read HN, like to learn new things. It's fun to pick up new languages, learn new paradigms, and experiment with different technologies. What's not fun is learning 10 different ways to handle promises, 4 different build…

The solution is not trying so hard to keep up. Keep your ears open for the major improvements that rise above the noise, but don't feel like you have to be on the cutting edge. Much of the cutting edge is (almost by definition) misguided or overcomplicated.

The sweet spot if your goal is to actually build something is taking whatever architecture is currently hip and throwing out about 2/3 of it in exchange for a simpler approach. Then circle back for the fancier libraries a few months later if and when you have a need for them.

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#70
post #3

To 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…

It's literally 93 page-downs to the "Hello world" On the upside, it all seems clear (if somewhat laborious to go through in totality) and I definitely appreciate that the majority of those 93 page-downs were covering setting up testing and a testing strategy + framework. It seems most things of this type are more likely to either say "set up testing" without detail, OR are guides specifically for doing testing withou…

Huh? The first "hello world" equivalent occurs in the beginning.

https://www.fullstackreact.com/articles/react-tutorial-cloni...

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