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Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

jackfranklin.co.uk

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Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#31

Post by tentacleuno »

interlocutor wrote: post #26

React works well for simple, non-interactive components. Complex, interactive components are going to have state. Stateful components don't work so well in React. If you want to update props in a stateful component, the recommendation is to replace the component entirely by changing its key. At the point all of the benefits of React (preservation of selection, caret position, scroll position etc.) vanish. You might a…

> Stateful components don't work so well in React. If you want to update props in a stateful component, the recommendation is to replace the component entirely by changing its key.

Do you have any concrete examples for this? I'm not sure I agree: I've made plenty of stateful components in React and they are just fine. If anything, they're a lot cleaner than what I could do in plain JavaScript, thanks to the framework.

Further, could you expand on what you mean re: recommending changing the key? I have never heard the React team suggesting to do this, although maybe I missed something in the documentation :-)

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#32

Post by [deleted] »

dmitriid wrote: post #12

Everything on the web "uses the platform". There's no other way to get content into the browser. Web Components are just a part of that platform, and very badly designed at that. A lot of the platform around them now exists only to patch holes in them (like form participation) and to solve the problems they introduced. And since they are now a part of the platform, they poison everything like upcoming CSS scoping whi…

[deleted]

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#33

Post by whimsicalism »

nightski wrote: post #19
ng12 wrote: post #11

> But the web platform isn't perfect, and I suspect most React developers have come across a situation where you’d love to be able to just tweak how your component is being rendered. Honestly, I haven't. The only potential caveat I can think of is when you have some non-reactive legacy code you want to embed inside a React component... but even then React's escape hatches are more than sufficient. If you're really wo…

The only case I have is I love to use D3 for vis. But the thing is it's trivial to embed D3 into a react component and either let react handle rendering via svg or honestly just let D3 take over the DOM in that component. I do this all the time and it works very well.

Does d3 have a typescript wrapper?

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#34

Post by rexpop »

It seems that the author switched from Facebook's React to [his employer] Google's [Lit](lit.dev), and subsequently wrote a blog post in praise of the hand that feeds.

> Replacing lit-html would be an undertaking but much less so than replacing React: it’s used in our codebase purely for having our components (re)-render HTML.

That's high praise. I might take a second look at Lit and style it facilitates.

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#35

Post by kall »

interlocutor wrote: post #26

React works well for simple, non-interactive components. Complex, interactive components are going to have state. Stateful components don't work so well in React. If you want to update props in a stateful component, the recommendation is to replace the component entirely by changing its key. At the point all of the benefits of React (preservation of selection, caret position, scroll position etc.) vanish. You might a…

Wait isn't state the whole point of react? What level of interactivity are you talking about? State and props, that's it's thing: you can always update them.

I've only need the "change key to flush components" trick very few times, and most of those where rush fixes for bugs that had a better "doing it right" fix at a different level.

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#36

Post by LAC-Tech »

Bellend wrote: post #27
TAKEMYMONEY wrote: post #14

> Was this slightly more work than using a library from npm? > I'd definitely recommend using a library for this, and we settled on lit-html (link to library from npm) This article is mostly about switching from React to Lit. You can use modern web APIs (like FormData) with React, FormData's not a replacement for state management. You can use Web Components with React, the way Fluent UI does ( https://docs.microsoft.…

Anyone know what is going on with lit-? Their TypeScript starter is painfully bloated and outdated and never seems to keep pace. I actually ended up looking at microsoft/fast for my use case but that seems to be stale in some way. I kind of feel that given the "simplicity" of a single class wrapping custom elements, everything is pretty boring. Note: I cannot do better.

Can't speak for the Lit framework, but never had any issues with lit-html or it's typescript defs, it's been rock solid.

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#37

Post by LAC-Tech »

v0idzer0 wrote: post #10
lozenge wrote: post #2

The author makes some fair points but I also think part of it is learning. It sounds like they had finished learning React and the ecosystem and all that was left was finding React bugs, and occasionally identifying ways to work around React's way of doing things. While they are still at a stage of learning Web APIs which means exciting discoveries.

Yeah agreed. The arc of learning seems to be… This is interesting -> this is the best thing in the world -> here’s how this could be better The “use the platform” people have been making this case for web components for at least 5 years now. The reality is WC will take off when and if they are a better alternative and even then they’ll need to be paired with some sort of framework. They may even make their way into R…

React very much feels like its own platform to me - having its own browser tools to debug it is a dead giveaway.

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#38

Post by datavirtue »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #24
_pdp_ wrote: post #8

If all you need is a couple of basic forms and some basic interaction, you can do it all with vanilla JS but let's not kid ourselves. This will not allow you to build very rich apps without implementing a significant chunk of the frameworks you dislike so much. In fact, I would even say that if this is not a core part of your product, you are simply wasting time and resources. There is a huge amount of man-hours pour…

I think react sits really well with some people, and with others it doesn't. For me I find I have to fight against the platform to separate presentation from behaviour. And let's not kid ourselves, a lot of react code bases do the classic winforms mistake of having an essentially code behind architecture.

And why was that a mistake?

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#39

Post by cyral »

nawgz wrote: post #23
nightski wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only case I have is I love to use D3 for vis. But the thing is it's trivial to embed D3 into a react component and either let react handle rendering via svg or honestly just let D3 take over the DOM in that component. I do this all the time and it works very well.

I wrote my own React components using D3 to do the underlying math but setting up my own DOM rendering. It's ok, my thoughts Pros: * I have generic "zoom/pan" implemented. I did this by making a generic ChartContainer with 5 zones - top, right, bottom, left, content - and you specify just the size of the non-content zones (if displaying them at all) and otherwise it behaves responsively (i.e. CSS style on the contain…

I also went this route and used d3 for the math but my own hand-made SVGs for the rendering so that the DOM is all in "react land".

You may want to check out this library: https://airbnb.io/visx/ They converted a ton of d3 features into proper React components

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#40

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

interlocutor wrote: post #26

React works well for simple, non-interactive components. Complex, interactive components are going to have state. Stateful components don't work so well in React. If you want to update props in a stateful component, the recommendation is to replace the component entirely by changing its key. At the point all of the benefits of React (preservation of selection, caret position, scroll position etc.) vanish. You might a…

This is categorically false. If you want to update props in a stateful component it is exactly the same - just pass new props.

If you instead are talking about syncing props with state, there are ways to do this as well without changing the key, but this is considered an anti-pattern in the first place.

This sounds more like bashing react without even knowing it very well in the first place.

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