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If not React, then what?

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Re: If not React, then what?

#141

Post by lucsky »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #99
thepasswordis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you find hard to learn about react? I think a lot of tutorials are really bad, might be the problem.

Not parent, but I'll answer anyway: React was much much easier to learn back when Class Components were the thing. Nowadays there is layers upon layers of magic like Functional Components with State from Hooks.

> Nowadays there is layers upon layers of magic like Functional Components with State from Hooks.

1. you can still write class based components if you want, but if you are in a team everyone will hate you for that because... 2. the preferred and vastly more flexible and powerful way is functional components. That's it, there isn't any other way or any other mystical layer of magic.

What everybody in this umpteenth omfg-react-is-satan thread is that implementing complex things with simple things is a fucking pipe dream. Fucking deal with it.

Re: If not React, then what?

#142

Post by floydnoel »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #68
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #57

I think React is fine, especially when using it mainly for rendering, keeping async stuff out of the components as much as possible. The React API is way nicer to construct DOM trees than using Fragments, creating and appending children elements, concatenating strings to produce HTML, etc. Imagine being able to do this without importing any 3rd party code: const content = html` Hello world! `; // New API: html Tagged…

... also TFA conflates web application architecture with frontend frameworks, creating a false dichotomy. For instance, I’m building a site that serves static HTML but still benefits greatly from Preact for the dynamic parts. The critique seems focused on SPA architectures heavily based on React, as seen in frameworks like Next.js and Remix. To be clear, I also lean away from that style of web application architectur…

I thought Next.js and Remix were SSR-based frameworks, both created as alternatives to building a SPA.

After the initial "SPA fever" died down, these frameworks cropped up to address the shortcomings of SPAs such as a lack of SEO-compatibility.

Re: If not React, then what?

#143

Post by lopatin »

I'll continue using vanilla React, for the same reason I use Java: it's reached the coveted "boring technology" status where it's mature, stable, fast enough, and has a huge community, resources, and ecosystem. I won't let go of that easily. However, this is a pretty epic rant nonetheless.

Re: If not React, then what?

#145

Post by MarcelOlsz »

lopatin wrote: post #143

I'll continue using vanilla React, for the same reason I use Java: it's reached the coveted "boring technology" status where it's mature, stable, fast enough, and has a huge community, resources, and ecosystem. I won't let go of that easily. However, this is a pretty epic rant nonetheless.

You're going to love Vue. Took me about half an hour to switch and be productive and never looked back. I've switched multiple teams/devs to it as well. If not just for the devtools experience. I switched right before all the messy React stuff started getting released.

Re: If not React, then what?

#146

Post by baggy_trough »

flimsypremise wrote: post #134

I don't think the author of this article actually understands the pressures that increasingly drive all frontend development into javascript frameworks, but those pressures are actually very straightforward: • A large portion of the cost of maintaining a code repository goes toward maintaining the build. • Multiple builds per repo create significant costs. • Any web application with a UI _requires_ a frontend build f…

I write web apps with UI using ES6 native modules and https://stimulus.hotwired.dev. It's very simple, and life is good. No-build is the way.

Re: If not React, then what?

#147

Post by deergomoo »

flimsypremise wrote: post #134

I don't think the author of this article actually understands the pressures that increasingly drive all frontend development into javascript frameworks, but those pressures are actually very straightforward: • A large portion of the cost of maintaining a code repository goes toward maintaining the build. • Multiple builds per repo create significant costs. • Any web application with a UI _requires_ a frontend build f…

I think the author understands that just fine (I follow him on Mastodon and this is something he is very passionate about). To me his argument is that this shouldn't—and doesn't need to—be the case.

The vast majority of sites out there would be just fine, and in many cases much better, as traditional server-rendered pages with a thin layer of JS on top for enhancements and for islands of interactivity. That massively reduces the complexity and cost of creating and maintaining a build.

Most of us aren't working on anything that requires the entirety of every page and the entire navigation model to be implemented on the client.

Re: If not React, then what?

#148

Post by reconvene1290 »

peterkelly wrote: post #55
valenterry wrote: post #8

> Frameworkism isn't delivering. Correct. The reason is not the frameworks but the languages. What is needed is a much more high-level and feature-powerful language. Just look at react. Passing down dependencies/values is a pain. So what did react do? It introduced contexts. Similar, other react addons try to solve this problem. But they all sacrifice type-safety in the process. They simply cannot solve this problem;…

The React team should have done their own language, rather than making it a framework/library. Then they could ensure the absence of side effects in rendering code, and had a better way of detecting updates. The knowledge about how to do this was already out there for many years before they started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_reactive_programmin...

Isn’t that ReScript?

https://rescript-lang.org/

Re: If not React, then what?

#149

Post by goobert »

pier25 wrote: post #108
dimgl wrote: post #4

> Frameworkism isn't delivering. It isn't? I find React to be great to work with.

If React is so great how come Amazon isn't using it in their store? I think last year an Amazon frontend engineer wrote some tweets explaining they tried React and it was too slow. So they keep using Java for SSR and sprinkle vanilla JS. They were still using jQuery until a couple of years ago and probably still are in some parts of their site.

React is in use in many heavily used frontends at Amazon, maybe not the retail site

But there's no inherent reason React couldn't be used for a page that basically shows pictures of products with a description next to them, the bottlenecks will have nothing to do with the frontend in a well engineered system for that type of site

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