Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it? • Hacker News Board

Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it?

#1

Post by Ronsenshi » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 12:15 AM UTC

Just started working on a small node.js based personal project and would like to hear opinions regarding the general situation in the ReactJS environment from people who use it now or used it in the past but stopped for some reason(s).

If you do use it - are you happy with it? Maybe there are some things that you wish were different about it?

If you did use it, but not any more - what are the reasons you've stopped?

Re: Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it?

#2

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 12:39 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it?

#3

Post by nperez » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 12:49 AM UTC

I evaluated and used it briefly for a hobby project before starting my current job.

We have a lot of existing jQuery plugins, so it seemed that my options were to either add a bunch of new dependencies that duplicate their functionality in React, start a big project to move all jQuery based components over to React, or stick with jQuery (or React wrapping jQuery, which sounds like a number of headaches).

In the end I decided to use Riot.js for new components instead, which is tiny and plays well with all of our existing jQuery dependencies so we don't take a huge hit on overall transfer size. I would use React if I were building a new front end from the ground up.

Re: Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it?

#4

Post by nlolks » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 12:53 AM UTC

Hi, since it a small project. Why not try using the MEAN stack. mongodb express angularjs node.

Re: Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it?

#5

Post by bwilliams » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 12:59 AM UTC

I've been using React a good bit lately and it's fun to use. Overall I'd say I'm happy working with it and Flux. It's definitely a toss up between it and Ember for me.

Re: Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it?

#6

Post by Cshelton » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 12:59 AM UTC

I'm using it for a very large enterprise app. React's advantage is the declarative style, very easy to reason about your View logic. Team productivity is up, fixing/changing older UI is easier/quicker, it's great. We've tried angular, we were using just vanilla JS and Jquery, React is great. A great resource you should check out is the slack channel Reactiflux. Many active people and they will answer any question you have!

At this point we have around 60 pages, hundreds of components. It scales very well. Give React a few days when trying it out. We also use our own customer flux implementaion, which makes handling front end data models easier through one directional data flow. I recommend checking that out also, it scales very well. Some of our pages right now would push angular to the limit with hundreds of rows, many different components, etc, React handles it really well without having to meticulously tweak performance, it just works. Angular can do the job as well, just needed a lot of quirks to make it work.

Re: Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it?

#7

Post by simplify » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 1:00 AM UTC

I tried it for a small project, but end up using Mithril.js for all my new projects instead. JSX, OOP, and Flux may be fine for some people, but I prefer to use plain, functional JavaScript.

Re: Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it?

#8

Post by biscarch » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 1:07 AM UTC

We use it at $work in an "isomorphic" context along with react-router[0] and fluxible[1]. I'm very happy with it and the ecosystem developing around it. Using React also provides an interesting lead-in to native apps with react-native.

We transpile all of our JS with babel as well. I'd be happy to answer any more specific questions as well.

[0]: https://github.com/rackt/react-router [1]: https://github.com/yahoo/fluxible

Re: Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it?

#9

Post by mattmc » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 1:11 AM UTC

I used it for a project, along with a simple Flux implementation, and it did the job well enough. The declarative, state-based aspect of it is great. This might be a small thing, but I also missed their unified onChange event when I moved to another tool.

I didn't really like JSX, though, and using straight-up JS to declare components is gross. Using React in general also seemed rather verbose, and I found myself digging through the API docs and trying to reason about the component lifecycle. It just wasn't as simple as I would like.

I ended up settling on RiotJS, which shares a philosophy with React but is closer to bare metal, so to speak. It feels more like a library and less like a framework. (They also just added mixins and HTML transclusion, two things that I missed from React.)

Re: Ask HN: ReactJS – Do you use it? Do you like it?

#10

Post by seivan » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 1:15 AM UTC

I wish it worked better with TypeScript. I love the concept and I've always felt that front-end web was broken compared to iOS.

I've worked on converting some of Reacts tutorial to TypeScript just to try it out. Here's some of the code, and it's not 100%. https://gist.github.com/seivan/c01a3b1173cd237b8531