121–130 of 191 posts
I think many of the "advantages" of ReactJS are just hype - Immutable data, one directional data flow are easier to learn, understand, harder to break etc. - This isn't anything new, these are just concepts taken from declarative programming. You could always have used those concepts in your JS. They aren't better/worse than imperative programming. That's like saying Haskell is better than C++. - Two-way binding crea…
But.... it is.
React.js is actually just really pleasant to work in and easy to reason about, and the virtual DOM is what makes that all possible without it becoming unacceptably slow. DOM diffing isn't there to make React faster than everything else ever imagined. It's there to let you stop thinking about the DOM and focus on the world state of your frontend instead. I wasn't truly interested in React until I read this, which does…
The DOM itself is also a leaky abstraction. Render cycles are so prohibitively slow that we've started maintaining a parallel DOM and implementing diffing algorithms in JavaScript. As brilliant as that may be, it's also crazy that it's come to that.
This is a problem that should be solved in the browser. HTML5 should add a simple API to transactionally update the DOM and only render after all changes are committed. This would prevent every single framework from having to implement this logic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was swept away by the React hype a bit. I tried to sell my team on React by stating many of the same points and eventually we decided to stick with our current JS framework: ExtJS. And I'm thankful I was overruled a bit. For our team and the types of applications we're building ExtJS simply makes much more sense. I've used React now for a simple web app and also a Chrome extension. For certain UIs scenarios like Fa…
We're in the process of migrating from ExtJS to React, and it is, to put it simply, awesome. Ext was great when we started because it gave us all these great out-of-the-box components to just mix and match and shove things together and get things out the door. But relatively quickly (i.e. as soon as we wanted to make something look like it wasn't Ext, and you can always easily tell an Ext app) we ran into Ext's infle…
Regarding boilerplate, I'll give you a simple example. In ExtJS 4, it's one line of code to wire up an event handler in your controller to a view component like a "Save" button. Then in your onSaveButtonClicked event handler in your controller, you typically you write something like:
myView.setLoading(true) // to mask the view
myModel.save() // to execute an Ajax req,
on success,
myView.setLoading(false)
I'm not against React at all - just for our purposes ExtJS seems like a better fit. To be fair, I did spent some time building a custom URL router which really simplifies everything. All of our controllers are consistent with start() and stop() methods, they can define data dependencies (i.e. this data needs to be loaded before start is called), etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Finally, wrt to React: it's just a view layer. Comparing it to Ember or Angular as if it were a fully fledged, swappable alternative doesn't really make sense. This every time. If there's any bloggers among you: as soon as you start doing a 1:1 comparison between Angular and React, stop.
I (apparently incorrectly) thought they were similar enough to compare. What are the significant additional features that Ember and Angular provide?
- a full MV* implementation - routing - DI - decorators - CSP / XSS protection - a ton of services for mocking for unit tests ($http, $window, et al)
I'm sure I'm missing a fair amount of stuff here, too. This is just what I get out of Angular 1.x on a daily basis.
The basic premise seems to be that AngularJS can be just as performant as ReactJS if you do your homework and avoid common pitfalls of AngularJS. I would argue that the beauty of ReactJS is that it doesn't have any gotchas. It's performant without needing a deep knowledge of the framework.
> The basic premise seems to be that AngularJS can be just as performant as ReactJS if you do your homework and avoid common pitfalls of AngularJS. While AngularJS(1.x) is a bit faster now, your comment is a bit like saying Ruby can be equally fast to Java if one does it homework. AngularJS has architectural problems that can only be reduced if one doesn't use much of angular features(scopes,watches) inside directive…
This, by the way, is an EXCELLENT example of the kind of arguments that have come out of the React.js camp that give me a lot of pause. There's radical differences made in how frontend applications are developed with React, and the primary selling point that I kept hearing was "embrace it, the performance difference is HUGE!". Then as arguments come out about how the performance differences have caveats, the arguments switch to "...well this is how we should be developing, for X, Y, and Z architectural reasons". I'm not saying that X, Y, and Z aren't valid discussion points, but it's been wrapped up in so much pseudo-technical FUD, and that's pretty unfortunate.
Signed, Recovering Template-Aholic
React.js is actually just really pleasant to work in and easy to reason about, and the virtual DOM is what makes that all possible without it becoming unacceptably slow. DOM diffing isn't there to make React faster than everything else ever imagined. It's there to let you stop thinking about the DOM and focus on the world state of your frontend instead. I wasn't truly interested in React until I read this, which does…
Their benchmarks have it at 8x faster at rendering (uncompiled) and 28x faster to load (although Benchmarks Lie (TM)).
It feels like writing vanilla javascript for the most part, which is delightful and exciting. The Views part however, which is most comparable with React since React only deals with views, is extremely reminiscent of React, and you can even write MSX, which is just basically JSX with some subtle differences.
EDIT: Link
React.js is actually just really pleasant to work in and easy to reason about, and the virtual DOM is what makes that all possible without it becoming unacceptably slow. DOM diffing isn't there to make React faster than everything else ever imagined. It's there to let you stop thinking about the DOM and focus on the world state of your frontend instead. I wasn't truly interested in React until I read this, which does…
> pleasant to work with if you're a startup or small shop. if you have to deal with any native code that expects to know something about the dom, now you just forced that code to do expensive and constant polling algos because you completely pulled the dom from under its feet.
React.js is actually just really pleasant to work in and easy to reason about, and the virtual DOM is what makes that all possible without it becoming unacceptably slow. DOM diffing isn't there to make React faster than everything else ever imagined. It's there to let you stop thinking about the DOM and focus on the world state of your frontend instead. I wasn't truly interested in React until I read this, which does…
I just have to add that this is how pages were generated server-side before XmlHttpRequest emerged. This was deliberate. Addressable and re-loadable states were part of the original design by Tim Berners-Lee. The fact that we have had this whole circus with mutable state on the client side is just a joke to me. I hope that someone invents a sane client-side lib with sane page generation quite soon. Should certainly b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're in the process of migrating from ExtJS to React, and it is, to put it simply, awesome. Ext was great when we started because it gave us all these great out-of-the-box components to just mix and match and shove things together and get things out the door. But relatively quickly (i.e. as soon as we wanted to make something look like it wasn't Ext, and you can always easily tell an Ext app) we ran into Ext's infle…
Is your main complaint over theming ExtJS? We're also building enterprisey software that's for the most part not consumer facing. Our clients are much more concerned about functionality. So while we have several custom themes for our products, we haven't drastically altered the base themes. Regarding boilerplate, I'll give you a simple example. In ExtJS 4, it's one line of code to wire up an event handler in your con…
I should have also caveat-ed that we are on ExtJS 3, so ymmv with 4.
The way you've concisely written the Ext code and long-form written out the React code does show some form of bias, as what you're really doing with React is pretty much the same as how you've written the Ext code, but if you write out the full path of any kind of UI update it will seem more complex. I mean, adding "the store is notified that something changed and redraws itself to show the loading mask/spinner" is what, 2 lines of code? But a long-form explanation makes it seem like a bigger deal.
Your Ext code is missing all the logic to actually set up the Ajax stuff, all the event handling that you call out in React, error handling, etc... If you came into a React system with all the same things set up that you're assuming in your Ext system (data bindings, event handling, visual components) then the code to accomplish the same thing looks almost identical.
As I said, Ext is great if you want to do what Ext wants you to do. It magics away a lot of stuff that you have to call out explicitly with React+Flux. But the second something goes wrong or you want to try something else that magic bites you in the ass.
All I can say is that my experience switching from Ext to React has been one of massive amounts of time wasted figuring out the quirk of event flows and component layout hierarchies to front-end code that just makes sense and does what you'd expect and is ridiculously simple to debug.
The basic premise seems to be that AngularJS can be just as performant as ReactJS if you do your homework and avoid common pitfalls of AngularJS. I would argue that the beauty of ReactJS is that it doesn't have any gotchas. It's performant without needing a deep knowledge of the framework.
> The basic premise seems to be that AngularJS can be just as performant as ReactJS if you do your homework and avoid common pitfalls of AngularJS. While AngularJS(1.x) is a bit faster now, your comment is a bit like saying Ruby can be equally fast to Java if one does it homework. AngularJS has architectural problems that can only be reduced if one doesn't use much of angular features(scopes,watches) inside directive…