Ask HN: Is there a sane alternative to Angular and React?

Came here to mention this one. Vue is nice and clear in all the ways React and Angular (both flavors) are not.

It's just simple and enforces "good" practices by making sense of them.

I'll semi-answer your question by giving you my standard set of advice and resources for learning React.

The article "A Study Plan to Cure Javascript Fatigue" ( https://medium.freecodecamp.com/a-study-plan-to-cure-javascr... ) is a great place to start. It gives an excellent series of steps for tackling modern Javascript concepts one piece at a time: Javascript, React, ES6, and state management.

On that note, definitely don't over-complicate the learning process by trying to learn many different things at once. Some people will say you should use a "boilerplate" to learn React, and they're wrong - boilerplate projects almost always come with too many pieces configured, and are confusing for beginners.

Instead, the best advice is to focus on learning React itself first. Once you have a good understanding of how React works, you will better appreciate why a state management library like Redux can be useful, and you can learn about other tools later.

You should start out by reading through the official React docs and tutorial at https://facebook.github.io/react/, and I'd encourage you to use the official Create-React-App tool ( https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app ) for setting up projects. It creates a project with a solid build setup, with no configuration needed on your part. There's an excellent post called "Simple React Development in 2017" ( https://hackernoon.com/simple-react-development-in-2017-113b... ) that gives some more specific instructions on the actual steps to follow.

Past that, I keep a big list of links to high-quality tutorials and articles on React, Redux, and related topics, at https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links . Specifically intended to be a great starting point for anyone trying to learn the ecosystem, as well as a solid source of good info on more advanced topics. It includes links for learning core Javascript (ES5), modern Javascript (ES6+), React, and much more. I also published an "Intro to React (and Redux)" presentation at http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/02/presentation-react-... , which is a good overview of the basic concepts for both React and Redux.

Finally, the Reactiflux chat channels on Discord are a great place to hang out, ask questions, and learn. The invite link is at https://www.reactiflux.com .

I'm pretty new to Rails, but I'm implementing something very similar to this. Is there's any open source mature Rails app that might demonstrate what your seeing/maintaining? I'd be curious to see how this pattern looks as it grows.

As someone else said the platform itself is not sane.

However on the scale of things that we have, React is pretty sane.

I have never seen someone who spent significant time with React and thought it wasn't sane.

There are some people who are stuck with some 2005 MVC jQuery PHP AJAX mindset repeating worn-out lines like "don't mix logic with views". All their alarms go off when they see JSX.

I don't for a moment think any of this crap that we have is "elegant".

I hate TypeScript/Javascript/React/Redux/Webpack/JSX/Yarn/NPM/Node etc... and I also love them and use them.

Those things that I listed in 2017 enable a class of web applications to be created that is simply not practical to build with send-html-from-the-server-and-sprinkle-jquery-event-handlers-on-the-client technologies.

At this point it's Javascript vs everything else.

I used to build applications with PHP/Laravel/Django/Flask/Sinatra etc... now I don't consider them anymore for web applications (still ok for content sites, not complex applications).

The smooth robust magical UI/UX that I can achieve with TypeScript/React is miles ahead of all other options, it's still full of crap, but still miles ahead of other options.

Again I re-iterate my main point, which is things have now changed in such a way that the competition has become Javascript/TypeScript vs everyone else.

If you are going to build HTML in a string on the server and sprinkle some javascript on top it doesn't make that much difference whether you use PHP or Python.

> Now I wish I could use similar combo for mobile and desktop development.

Check out "re-natal". That at least gets you mobile, and perhaps desktop once react native has a good desktop story.