React is badly designed
pandastrike.com
React is badly designed
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Re: React is badly designed
#2I understand the motivation for wanting to avoid frameworks when it looks like a native solution is right around the corner, but that’s just it – it’s not here yet. There isn’t even experimental support for Web Components in either the most popular desktop browser or the most popular mobile browser, and the polyfills are simply nowhere near as mature or well-supported as React and Angular are for the same purposes.
So yes, you could develop for Web Components today, and it would “work” everywhere and it would be the platonic ideal of future-proof web development. It just wouldn’t be very pragmatic.
Re: React is badly designed
#3I understand the motivation for wanting to avoid frameworks when it looks like a native solution is right around the corner, but that’s just it – it’s not here yet. There isn’t even experimental support for Web Components in either the most popular desktop browser or the most popular mobile browser, and the polyfills are simply nowhere near as mature or well-supported as React and Angular are for the same purposes. S…
Chrome's the most popular desktop browser [1], and Chrome for Android is the most popular mobile browser [2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
[2] http://caniuse.com/#search=shadow%20dom
It passed IE for desktop in mid-2012, and iOS Safari for mobile in late 2012 or early 2013.
I agree with your general point since the all Webcomponents-supporting browsers are barely a majority. But the web looks very different from it did even a couple months ago.
Re: React is badly designed
#4> But what has [virtual DOM] got to do with reactive programming? Or embedding markup in JavaScript?
It makes it possible to implement React's componentisation model in a performant manner.
It allows React to not only work in all major browsers today, but to use its SyntheticEvent implementation to patch up and normalise aspects of their behaviour which are important when writing webapps.
While React's ideas about data flow might not be new, the componentisation model it uses to implement them makes it incredibly easy to compose and reuse UI components, with a well-defined method of passing data between them and controlling re-rendering.
It allows React components to be easily pre-rendered on the server and rehydrated to be interactive on the client from the initial markup using the same codebase, making progressive enhancement easier to implement, therefore more likely to be implemented.
That's why the virtual DOM isn't the most interesting thing about React, rather what it enables.
It would be nice if native Web Components just worked everywhere right now, but they don't. Maybe some day React will just another way to implement the innards of a native Web Component, but at the moment it's just better then them.
Re: React is badly designed
#5Good clickbait, but almost nonsensical article. The idea of supporting web components is great, but it's also a standards process in committee. React and Web Components can play together (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TD0efcwVg), so why draw some sort of false dichotomy between the technologies.
The thought that went into the virtual dom diffing strategy is an algorithmic nicety that software in general can and has already benefitted from. React itself is an implementation of that which provides real workflow improvements for web and now native platforms. That's pretty awesome and usable right now. I don't see this as a zero sum game, or as an all in investment strategy unless you are going into some arcane questions of licensing, the code and the ideas are out in the open. Ember, mythril, Om have all taken the ideas into new regions.
Even look at the atom editor, they switched to react for their editor component, then realized the general purpose dom diffing strategy which is very fast could still be optimized for their edit window. That's awesome. That idea is decoupled from react. Learning to read react code takes about 1 day to 1 week. It's pretty awesome.
Also, the canard about reactive programming... uhh... I just don't get what you're advertising here? That you're willing to use products like docker and node.js as advertised on your front page, but not react.js because... it's "bad"? Why so inflexible, why not try all the things and use what works as time permits?
Re: React is badly designed
#6Why can't I zoom the text on this website in and out?
Re: React is badly designed
#7Good clickbait, but almost nonsensical article. The idea of supporting web components is great, but it's also a standards process in committee. React and Web Components can play together ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TD0efcwVg ), so why draw some sort of false dichotomy between the technologies. The thought that went into the virtual dom diffing strategy is an algorithmic nicety that software in general can and…
On React in Atom: https://discuss.atom.io/t/whats-the-status-of-react-in-atom/...
Do you have an update beyond this?
Re: React is badly designed
#8Good clickbait, but almost nonsensical article. The idea of supporting web components is great, but it's also a standards process in committee. React and Web Components can play together ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TD0efcwVg ), so why draw some sort of false dichotomy between the technologies. The thought that went into the virtual dom diffing strategy is an algorithmic nicety that software in general can and…
On React in Atom: https://discuss.atom.io/t/whats-the-status-of-react-in-atom/... Do you have an update beyond this?
I use atom as an editor for markdown. But I don't know about if they're using React in it or not. I don't follow the dev that closely. I am still rather sure you can develop plugins in react, which is fine.
My point being that require('react'); wasn't the best fit for their editor window (which doesn't need events to be intercepted, etc), but the idea behind virtual dom diffing and how they updated their window left an impact. The concepts behind react got them thinking in a new way, which is ultimately much more important than their dependency on a 0.x.y release library.
If anything, the design of react was a stepping stone to where they've ended up now. It wasn't "bad", so much as unoptimized for their specific task. For me I'm glad it can intercept events (usually), since it simplifies cross browser compatibility. Atom is essentially one browser version, so it doesn't need that overhead.
Re: React is badly designed
#9Good clickbait, but almost nonsensical article. The idea of supporting web components is great, but it's also a standards process in committee. React and Web Components can play together ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TD0efcwVg ), so why draw some sort of false dichotomy between the technologies. The thought that went into the virtual dom diffing strategy is an algorithmic nicety that software in general can and…
On React in Atom: https://discuss.atom.io/t/whats-the-status-of-react-in-atom/... Do you have an update beyond this?
Atom doesn't use React any longer for their editor component
> React is a great tool for many cases, for our particular needs in this particular case I decided it would be easier to just do things for ourselves.