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React is mostly hype

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Re: React is mostly hype

#81

Post by mercurial »

jukkakoskinen wrote: post #70
statictype wrote: post #28

I see some point-missing arguments being made here. React isn't for scale. And it isn't to side step learning about html and css. It's main reason for existence is to make complex UIs easy to manage. Pretty much the only argument I can think of against React is that it's a boil-the-ocean system. Once you start doing your UI with it, you pretty much need to make the entire thing use react to really benefit from its mo…

"Once you start doing your UI with it, you pretty much need to make the entire thing use react to really benefit from its model." In my experience React is quite ideal for cases where some parts of a site or an app need dynamic behavior. I'm currently working on an e-commerce platform's admin panel, and for us a complete rewrite would have been nearly impossible. With React we can keep the old HTML + jQuery codebase,…

That's the same thing we're doing at my company (with the aim of eventually replacing the old platform entirely), and it's working out very well.

Re: React is mostly hype

#82

Post by kranner »

chatmasta wrote: post #32
izelnakri wrote: post #9

I want to downvote you as I dont agree with you, but unfortunately I can't.

Generally downvotes are best used not to indicate disagreement, but to punish comments that detract from or add little to the discussion. If we downvoted everyone who disagrees with us, discussion wouldn't be very meaningful. But if we downvote those who do not add to the discussion, we can maintain high signal to noise ratio. Let's not turn HN into Reddit.

I understand that this is the intended policy on HN, but I have seen far too many cases where a greyed out/downvoted comment has obviously been downvoted for disagreement to believe that the policy holds in practice.

Maybe there should be an 'are you sure?' prompt on pressing the downvote button reminding users of the policy.

Re: React is mostly hype

#83

Post by [deleted] »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #63
hoodoof wrote: post #33

I really don't give a shit what anyone says, for me personally ReactJS makes front end great fun to program and an absolute blast and empowers me like never before to build powerful, interactive front end apps with a code base that is well structured, understandable and makes sense. Until React I dreaded front end development, painful, weird, quirky, hard to organise and generally problemtic. With React I feel like a…

Angular was a bad idea. In sooo many ways... -Two-way binding in all cases is slow -Directives are unecessarily hard to write -Angular's default DI model breaks on alpha conversion, the basis of every JS minifier ever. All the fixes are cumbersome. -The system is poorly documented, making it hard for a dev to get started. -The system is overly complex, slow, and hard to debug ($digest already in progress, anyone?). -…

[deleted]

Re: React is mostly hype

#84

Post by praetorian84 »

I've been using React for a side project for a while. Generally it's been pretty easy to understand the concepts behind it and get productive. A couple of things that have confused/irked me a little:

- Having to figure out babel, browserify and/or webpack before you can write hello world isn't a great first experience. I'm glad to see much of this has been moved to a separate page outside of the getting started guide now.

- The main React page emphasises that JSX is optional. Even looking at the trivial examples, nesting createElement statements looks horrific. Does anyone use this approach in a large-scale project? If your components are fine-grained enough, perhaps it's passable, but it looks far from ideal. Having used other frameworks, even building up a template in JSX in a return statement feels dirty. I see there are some suggestions around on splitting out JSX, but it would be great if this was the default.

- I wasn't really sure what to do with CSS. There's a brief comment on inline-styles at https://facebook.github.io/react/tips/inline-styles.html. For a library for building user interfaces, it seems like this deserves more attention. I would've expected the CSS (styling), javascript (logic and state management) and JSX (layout) to be a little less interwoven.

Re: React is mostly hype

#85

Post by rubber_duck »

liamzebedee wrote: post #22
cageface wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React itself is pretty simple and very nice to work with. The whole react/redux/react-redux/react-router/react-router-redux/webpack/babel/flow agglomeration on the other hand is a lot more complex and subject to a lot of api churn. But you can actually get pretty far just using React by itself. Don't adopt other parts of this stack until you actually really need them and you can go pretty far with just a few concepts…

Fully-agree. From the start, Netflix was talking about React being useful because you can drop it in to various pages without affecting other UI views. I use it at work on a page-by-page basis-- it drastically reduces the mental overhead of class naming, JQuery spaghetti, maintaining the DOM etc. Sometimes I even surprise myself when something "just works" because of React's well-controlled model.

>Fully-agree. From the start, Netflix was talking about React being useful because you can drop it in to various pages without affecting other UI views.

This is Reacts greatest strength and a huge design constraint they had from day one. On the other hand it's a tradeoff and as everyone mentioned not having the whole stack under "one roof" brings a lot of tedious crap.

If you need something to incrementally rewrite parts of your frontend React would probably the best choice. If you need something to start your project on I'd consider other options, Angular 2 and Aurelia for example.

Re: React is mostly hype

#86

Post by DHMO »

Was not aware of this until reading:

"Your license to use React.js can be revoked if you compete with Facebook"

http://react-etc.net/entry/your-license-to-use-react-js-can-...

This is the scariest part to me:

"The library is open sourced under BSD, but it comes with an added patent clause that you should be aware of."

https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS

From reading more, it appears that Facebook can just terminate your right to use their patents, but not React. However, it isn't clear to me what is patented and what rights you lose.

Related past discussions here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9271331

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11270213

On the bright side, it's said that Apple and Google are ok with the latest version:

https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/3554#issuecomment-235...

Re: React is mostly hype

#87

Post by saskurambo »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #63
hoodoof wrote: post #33

I really don't give a shit what anyone says, for me personally ReactJS makes front end great fun to program and an absolute blast and empowers me like never before to build powerful, interactive front end apps with a code base that is well structured, understandable and makes sense. Until React I dreaded front end development, painful, weird, quirky, hard to organise and generally problemtic. With React I feel like a…

Angular was a bad idea. In sooo many ways... -Two-way binding in all cases is slow -Directives are unecessarily hard to write -Angular's default DI model breaks on alpha conversion, the basis of every JS minifier ever. All the fixes are cumbersome. -The system is poorly documented, making it hard for a dev to get started. -The system is overly complex, slow, and hard to debug ($digest already in progress, anyone?). -…

Two way data bind is fast because a graph of binds and dependency is created. So you can have atomic updates while in virtual dom you must rerun all the tree. See vue.js and ractive But is also true that 2way double binding take more memory that virtual dom.

Re: React is mostly hype

#88

Post by brightball »

vbezhenar wrote: post #78
cageface wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React itself is pretty simple and very nice to work with. The whole react/redux/react-redux/react-router/react-router-redux/webpack/babel/flow agglomeration on the other hand is a lot more complex and subject to a lot of api churn. But you can actually get pretty far just using React by itself. Don't adopt other parts of this stack until you actually really need them and you can go pretty far with just a few concepts…

> Don't adopt other parts of this stack until you actually really need them and you can go pretty far with just a few concepts. Redux is very core concept. You'll have to rewrite half of an application, unless you use it from the start. Routing is essential for any serious web site, so you have to implement it one way or another, and not using working libraries looks strange. Same about babel — either use it from the…

I'd tend to agree with the parent here. Then appeal of React is that it's one piece where everyone else is trying to develop a full stack. Your needs for that single piece will be more consistent across projects that are either legacy or new.

A full frontend stack is total overkill for the vast majority of projects that fall under the "open, check, close" use case. So many of the perks of those frontend stacks, such as keeping data in the browser and only reloading certain parts are based on the slow load times of a full frontend stack if you don't do all of those things.

Being able to use pure React both client and server side without anything else is a fairly significant perk.

Re: React is mostly hype

#89

Post by Klathmon »

praetorian84 wrote: post #84

I've been using React for a side project for a while. Generally it's been pretty easy to understand the concepts behind it and get productive. A couple of things that have confused/irked me a little: - Having to figure out babel, browserify and/or webpack before you can write hello world isn't a great first experience. I'm glad to see much of this has been moved to a separate page outside of the getting started guide…

IMO the whole CSS issue isn't "solved" yet.

There are like 3 or 4 different ways of doing it, each with their own pretty big drawbacks.

Personally we ended up using CSS Modules with SASS in our "main" react project, but it feels clunky.

The biggest issue we have is determining which element "owns" the styling. Should a widget style itself, or should it let it's container style it, or should it provide some simple defaults and let the container overwrite them (which gets ugly because with CSS Modules overwriting means using !important or doubling classes (like `.button.button` to overwrite `.button`).

All that being said, it's actually working out really well for us despite feeling wrong. And it might not ever become an issue because our largest stylesheet is like 100 lines long since everything is so compartmentalized.

Re: React is mostly hype

#90

Post by cellis »

DHMO wrote: post #86

Was not aware of this until reading: "Your license to use React.js can be revoked if you compete with Facebook" http://react-etc.net/entry/your-license-to-use-react-js-can-... This is the scariest part to me: "The library is open sourced under BSD, but it comes with an added patent clause that you should be aware of." https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS From reading more, it appears that Facebook ca…

The excerpt in the article is more accurate; if you initiate a patent infringement claim against FB, you forfeit your rights to use react. Seems fair to me.
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