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What I wish I knew about React

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Re: What I wish I knew about React

#171

Post by ativzzz »

ddek wrote: post #108
7777fps wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's great until it isn't. You can design all the declarative things you want, but someone will eventually come up with a requirement that doesn't appear to fit a declarative structure, such as an event that fires 2 seconds after something else happens. And so to resolve that you can construct state machines with transition states to get back to a declarative model, but those state machines can quickly become a…

I can call ‘setTimeout’ from the component? I honestly don’t see the issue with your example. I’d use an event handler to work out when something happened. This would set the timeout, and the handle would be stored as a ref. I’d have a use effect hook to clean up the timer, so when the component is unmounted the timeout is cleared. What’s the issue here?

The issue is it's not as simple as calling `setTimeout` as soon as your use case becomes more complex. See this great post from Dan Abramov about using setInterval with hooks: https://overreacted.io/making-setinterval-declarative-with-r...

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#172

Post by have_faith »

dvcrn wrote: post #83

I am not so up to date with frontend dev but what's with the hate towards React these days? It still does what it's supposed to do very well and very fast. Yeah sure if you want JSX you need transpilation but I would want that anyway if I want any of the ES6 features without losing browser compatibility. And it's also constantly evolving and getting better. Just recently I started a React project with class component…

I think the number of concepts that need to be understood to be an efficient React developer has grown over the years just enough that it has become slightly frustrating to learn. It is still presented as a very simple small surface area framework but there's a lot of subtly with how many new concepts need to be understood now like hooks as an example. I think it just crossed a threshold and became less intuitive and more tiresome as a result unless you are embedded in React land and do React stuff all the time.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#173

Post by TomMarius »

goliatone wrote: post #85
TomMarius wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's so hard/bad? Literally zero config and two commands: npm install -g parcel-bundler parcel ./index.html

It adds complexity. Software rots faster. You are more likely to git clone a 7 year old front end project and be able to run it successfully than a 7 month old project. It’s hard to find projects that successfully pin versions down so that you can build them after regular work on them has stopped.

I have projects from 7 years ago that got dependencies stuck on an old major (that's the default) and the webpack I put there in 2013 still successfully builds. The original versions are noted in package.json, so all you might need to do is fix it to the minor/patch (1min task with search/replace). I wouldn't be afraid of parcel - you can do the same thing.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#174

Post by koonsolo »

jarym wrote: post #169

I write a lot of enterprise apps and I’ve seen many many frameworks come and go over the years. I personally am not impressed with React and don’t get what all the fuss is about. We’ve had Angular, jQuery and a whole bunch of stuff over the years and each one managed to become a ‘a thing’ for a while

React introduced a whole new way of writing GUI's.

I come from a game development background, and there we had Immediate GUI's for some time now (https://eliasdaler.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/imgui-sfml-tutor...). React basically translates this concept to the web, and does some optimizations to not rebuild the entire DOM from scratch, and only rebuild when state changes and not every frame.

Writing a 'render function' is simpler and easier than building a structure of widgets and letting them handle events. (I like simple and easy)

Anyway, it seems both react and flutter are also gaining on the mobile apps developments, and web developers are very happy using React.

Of course frameworks come and go, but React introduced a shift of mind when programming GUI's.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#175

Post by cwhiz »

prodave wrote: post #2

Aren’t hooks more confusing than the class components? In a class, you write your initialization code in the constructor - no infinite loop if you fetch something. And anyone who has used classes in Java or other languages would feel at home.

Class components feel like a spaghetti mess to me whereas Hooks are obvious, straightforward, and clean. I understand that others feel differently but I personally cannot stand working with class components.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#176

Post by cwhiz »

dvt wrote: post #44
osdiab wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally find “the HTML is a function of its inputs, internal state, and nothing else” to be a much more predictable model for writing large web applications than, “anybody anywhere in your code can pull the rug from under you arbitrarily with jQuery”, and for that alone I prefer the React development experience. With Hooks I’m happy in that most of the “business logicky” stuff can be split out into those and my…

> I personally find “the HTML is a function of its inputs, internal state, and nothing else” to be a much more predictable model for writing large web applications than, “anybody anywhere in your code can pull the rug from under you arbitrarily with jQuery”, and for that alone I prefer the React development experience. Respectfully, that's not at all what HTML is supposed to be, but even so, as it turns out, sometime…

I don’t really care what HTML is supposed to be.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#177

Post by iainmerrick »

partyboat1586 wrote: post #163
sametmax wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been coding and training people in react for a while now, and here is my experience: - if you learned react by yourself years ago, you had to go through a lot of pain: the doc was terrible, the ecosystem a moving flaky target and conventions were not established. Things are better today, but it's not something you forget. Somebody starting react in 2018, and with create-react-app, will feel much happier. - if yo…

React native code re-use is possible just not in the way people imagined. You can reuse your Redux code, you can reuse higher order components you just can't reuse the atomic UI elements. React native performance is good too it just doesn't come for free. You need to know how to do native animations and you need to do late binding and all the other performance optimisations you should be doing with React anyway. The…

Is React Native performance really good? Compared to what?

I've found RN performance passable but underwhelming. It seems generally worse than a good native UI, and no better than a mobile web UI.

I don't understand why the JS is run in a separate thread, rather than just using the UI thread for UI (as it's intended for). By making all the interaction with the native toolkit asynchronous, it adds extra latency and leads to unavoidable glitches in native widgets used as controlled components.

Animation in React Native is much more of a hassle than UIKit or even CSS. (About the same as native Android, though, where it's also pretty tedious.)

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#178

Post by iainmerrick »

anon9001 wrote: post #90
kuschku wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but how is that different from any other UI framework? onCreate/onStart/onResume and onComponentDidMount, onPause/onStop/onDestroy and onComponentWillUnmount are basically the same. Be it Android, Swing, or Qt, everywhere it's the same pattern. React is the first framework which actually feels like UI development on the web, not anymore like JS spaghetti. In fact, having internal state, externally given props, e…

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... > JavaScript classes, introduced in ECMAScript 2015, are primarily syntactical sugar over JavaScript's existing prototype-based inheritance. The class syntax does not introduce a new object-oriented inheritance model to JavaScript. You've been tricked into thinking you're using a class, but you're really not. I understand it's a useful trick, but hooks a…

I disagree. I think that's like saying C++ doesn't actually have classes, it's just syntactic sugar around structs of function pointers.

It may be technically correct, but C++ and now JS have a "class" keyword for a reason, and that's to steer you towards organising your code into classes which operate in certain ways. In both languages you can avoid using classes, sure, or abuse classes in various ways. But fundamentally they do have classes.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#179

Post by kumarvvr »

jarym wrote: post #169

I write a lot of enterprise apps and I’ve seen many many frameworks come and go over the years. I personally am not impressed with React and don’t get what all the fuss is about. We’ve had Angular, jQuery and a whole bunch of stuff over the years and each one managed to become a ‘a thing’ for a while

The mental model for a react component is very much simplified and consistent.

You declare how your view looks like, wire up the state and user interaction stuff and you have a self contained puece of code.

People doing UI stuff, before the advent of React usually highly appreciate it because they know how much work it takes to actually build a usable UI in vanilla JS.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#180

Post by buboard »

koonsolo wrote: post #174
jarym wrote: post #169

I write a lot of enterprise apps and I’ve seen many many frameworks come and go over the years. I personally am not impressed with React and don’t get what all the fuss is about. We’ve had Angular, jQuery and a whole bunch of stuff over the years and each one managed to become a ‘a thing’ for a while

React introduced a whole new way of writing GUI's. I come from a game development background, and there we had Immediate GUI's for some time now ( https://eliasdaler.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/imgui-sfml-tutor... ). React basically translates this concept to the web, and does some optimizations to not rebuild the entire DOM from scratch, and only rebuild when state changes and not every frame. Writing a 'render functio…

> React introduced a whole new way

What will happen to this way when React is "outroduced" ?

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