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React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

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Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#181
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…

>it just doesn't pay off to learn the new, cool thing when it's going to be obsolete in 3 months or less.

Does this actually happen? If you had learned Angular way back, you would still be in a comfortable situation. New stuff coming in, but it's compatible with the old stuff.

Same with React. Had you learned react when it was talked about, you would have gotten, what, at least 2 years worth of value by now?

And a lot of the build tools are independent of the tech. Grunt is still fine to use, and people release plugins for it all the time.

And here's the last thing: You don't have to spend 6 months to learn a thing. If you want to keep up, read about it for 15 minutes? That should be enough most of the time to get the philosophical differences between tools you know. And if it does intrigue you enough, engage with it.

This stuff is progress, if we went the other way we'd still be writing jQuery spaghetti code and having state integrity issues up the wazzoo from callback hell. You don't have to ride every train, but you can at least look at them as they go by.

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#182
post #166
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reiterate the top comment up above, the idea of this tutorial is to explicate everything a front-end dev might need to know. Furthermore, the tutorial is deliberately throwing in wrenches here and there (problems with loaders and such) in order to convey "how might one approach a similar problem". You're absolutely correct that most of this is, strictly speaking, unnecessary to get a basic React project off the gr…

Dude thanks for taking the time writing such a detailed reply! I wish I could give you more than one upvote..

Totally! To tell the truth, I actually really appreciated that you started your comment off with a complimentary tone, even if you had your frustrations about the tech. Small bits of positivity go a long way. :)

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but even the “Getting Started” guide on React's website requires that you have a "CommonJS module system" installed which, if you don't, means you have to make an intelligent choice between Browserify and webpack, which means you have to do some minimal research into what those are (and probably research "babel-js", while you're at it), install one of them using npm, which may require that you install or upgra…

By the same note, you likely won't be writing a complex desktop application without some tooling installed, with similar pre-requisites. I don't know why people get so irritated at "JS tooling is hard". Try writing an (INSERT FRAMEWORK HERE) app outside the browser. People assume that writing an APPLICATION for a browser is easy , which is why people get stuck maintaining monstrosities that are disorganized, not comp…

There is much less tooling and much less churn even for a very complex Java application

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#185
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you doing with python and go that "just works"? Anything you want. Dependency management is taken care of by a simple `pip install flask`, or a requirements.txt. The rest depends on the packages you are using. > It takes a lot more work to build a yelp clone with python than it does with react. And why do you think that? I could build a simple and performant Yelp clone with full authentication, admin acces…

Yeah so it's really not very simple.

"My tool that I'm intimately familiar with is easier than that tool that I don't know much about"

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#187

Cool tutorial, but first check if React is what you really need for your next thing. Facebook creates React to solve the problem of dealing with large applications with data that changes overtime. React became very popular to the point where the word gets spread saying this is the newest and coolest thing to learn. At this point the core idea and key aspects of why React is cool get misunderstood and we start assumin…

The cool thing about react is that it doesn't try to do everything. Compared to Angular react is minimalist. So that's why react is used so much: because it doesn't try to do everything, it's basically just javascript and doesn't require you to re-learn web dev, and if you want to extend it you can easily do that. React can be made to fit most needs. If all you're doing is serving a static web page then any framework…

But React does actually try to do everything. React components can only compose other React components, and so you have React components all the way down. And if passing data all the way down that tree gets tedious you need to start looking into some sort of Flux/Redux type of data handling solution. Pretty soon you're in-lining your CSS because half the tutorials and 3rd party React components are doing that and nothing you've written plays well with any of your existing code, not to mention the vast sea of code written using other libraries. React is a trap. It works best when you use it everywhere, as Facebook does, but it's not a friendly and open framework when it comes to compatibility with others, especially with coming standards like Web Components.

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#188
post #148

I've dealt with many technology stacks. If this is the future, we're F#$$%. Seriously, how can people be blasting older technology like Flash and Flex (which was GREAT), out of the water for not using web standards and then this Frankenstein of a "stack" is going so mainstream. Sure, there is the VM problem, but the language was good and so was the framework. This looks horrendous and scary. Imagine maintaining this…

Can you post one of your projects?

I currently work for large company (in Fortune 100) and behind NDA, I can't really show my stuff. But it's good work. I wrote my own data binding library, beyond that, it's all micro libs. What's your point?

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#189
post #93

Lots of complaining but no one offers a better solution. Any article detailing how to build a yelp clone is going to be kind of long. It's really not that bad compared to doing something like this with LAMP. Much simpler than Angular too. With Angular I feel like I have to re-learn web development and do everything the "angular way", and who knows when Angular three is coming out and the "Angular way" completely chan…

Here's a non-javascript javascript alternative that's a few orders of magnitude simpler:

http://intercoolerjs.org

Re: React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but even the “Getting Started” guide on React's website requires that you have a "CommonJS module system" installed which, if you don't, means you have to make an intelligent choice between Browserify and webpack, which means you have to do some minimal research into what those are (and probably research "babel-js", while you're at it), install one of them using npm, which may require that you install or upgra…

I'm looking here: https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/getting-started.html And seeing a JSFiddle link that is fully configured to work and zip file that includes all necessary files. What am I missing?

A generalised hatred for the JS ecosystem, I believe.
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