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ReactJS is a tax Facebook levies on startup web development

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Re: ReactJS is a tax Facebook levies on startup web development

#31
Could not agree more. I also think React serves its purpose really well, if and only if you will have a complex web app with a lot of updates, connections and a lot of abstraction in components is beneficial for you. So if you want to test everything and want to put everything in a component: Use React, it's proven to work in large scale, look at FB.

But React is not the perfect tool for all use cases. Often many parts of your web app don't need component abstraction. React feels like app development, not like web development. Especially if most of your problems are more web designer problems React makes things difficult for you. One point I absolutely don't like is all the "massive" amount of tooling you need to get React working in a good way. I want to do web development not to be a webpack hero.

Just to be clear: I like React and it serves its purpose. But if you want to be more flexible and don't need logic in every part of your project try something lighter like vue.js (2.0 is coming out soon), which feels like a good mixture of React and Angular best concepts, which is better and ideal for "glueing" stuff and your web templates together with some advanced logic. No need to make components everywhere. It's a lighter transition (from vanilla, jquery etc.) which gives you enough power to handle every medium complex web app. And you also have components there if you want ;)

Re: ReactJS is a tax Facebook levies on startup web development

#33

Web dev fads change so fast today, only young whipper snappers can keep up because they have both the time to waste and the ignorance not to know its yet another reinvention of the wheel. Case in point Enyo.

http://enyojs.com/

Re: ReactJS is a tax Facebook levies on startup web development

#34
I completely agree with this. Here is the key point of the article, which I think goes hand in hand with Facebook's mission to create a new web that they are entirely in control of: "From Facebook’s perspective, React has to serve two functions: - priming and funnelling programmers into their enterprise and - suppressing development efficiency elsewhere. It’s positioned very well to achieve both."

This isn't conspiracy or tinfoil-hattery as other comments have mentioned. I think it's really the case and I doubt Facebook disagrees.

Re: ReactJS is a tax Facebook levies on startup web development

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite surprised seeing quite many comments telling how they use React "for everything". Isn't React just a small[1] library that essentially does only one single thing? (And does it well) Takes a component definition, a state object, and then renders (and maintains) the component as a DOM structure? Unless I was looking into some other React that everyone's talking about, or I've had my eyes looking somewhere els…

I think the great think about React, and stop me if I've missed your point, is that they're actually just libraries, not framework's, you can just pull in the parts you need and work off of those. Say you're just doing a single page application, with some basic logic. You can just use React on its own to create components, as you don't need an entire state life-cycle. We do this a lot to 'enhance' our statically gene…

> Say you're just doing a single page application, with some basic logic

Not trying to argue here, but don't you think for a simple static SPA, using React and creating components is too much overhead ? Why not just create the good-ol' html pages with css and js ?

I always take into account something I call as a effort-to-gain ratio. i.e.- If I have to give a certain amount of effort, I need to see proportional gain. I just don't see a proportional gain with using React in static SPAs.

But I get your point too. At a certain point when you are too familiar with a certain style of development, its hard to let it go.

Re: ReactJS is a tax Facebook levies on startup web development

#36

Could not agree more. I also think React serves its purpose really well, if and only if you will have a complex web app with a lot of updates, connections and a lot of abstraction in components is beneficial for you. So if you want to test everything and want to put everything in a component: Use React, it's proven to work in large scale, look at FB. But React is not the perfect tool for all use cases. Often many par…

Frankly - if you're doing web development and not app development (using your words), you shouldn't be using any client-side templating at all. Just render templates server-side, and if necessary use something like InstantClick.

See also: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/03/06/maybe-we-could-tone-down-the-...

Re: ReactJS is a tax Facebook levies on startup web development

#37

This is silly. Facebook isn't forcing anyone to use React. People use it because it works better than the status quo. >The component philosophy of React does offer some organizational benefits, especially for working in a team, but it’s nothing that couldn’t be replicated by some simple coding conventions. If it's so simple to organize code why do many vanilla js codebases quickly devolve into spaghetti? It may be si…

> React predefines the rules and it is validated by a major tech company so people are apt to play along.

That's his point. By being giant Facebook can "force" React to others.

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