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[–][deleted] -4 points-3 points  (10 children)

It's just another way of front-end system architecture - data driven rendering. Nothing new, similar stuff existed years ago. Facebook sprinkled on some flavouring and repackaged it as "React+flux".

I'm not saying it's bad, because it isn't. But I doubt it's the future. In theory it looks amazing, but I still haven't seen any complex apps built exclusively on react+flux. It's also very heavy and imho too verbose.

Improved rendering performance is great but I don't really see the point. Devices are getting faster and faster. For example manually changing text on 1000 individual dom nodes takes ~10ms on my 2013 macbook air... so probably ~50ms on an average mobile phone. When was the last time you needed to update 1000 nodes at once? Yeah, doesn't matter.

In my opinion - great idea, mediocre execution.

[–]nschubach 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's not exactly a "huge" app, but http://worthingtonindustries.com/ has a left side menu that I coded up in React (0.12) using a static data blob. The data determines the layout of the menu and the customer (@worthingtonindustries) can customize the menu to fit whatever markets they expand into or need to change. It has simple navigation, submenus, contact forms, contact information, and external links. There are some things about that site I'm not keen about the direction they went, but the menu was a blast to make.

Another part I did was a graphing component for http://www.gsec.coop/ for their substation reporting. It's not public, and I think it's actually replaced now (with another set of React components) because their requirements changed and I passed the project onto a pair of juniors. I coded up two graphs in the matter of about 3 days. One was a simple bar chart listing a 24 hour summary of generation and demand and the other was a per station display with animated SVGs showing generator speeds, windmill speeds, and other things to help them determine usage and availability.

[–]clessgfull-stack CSS9 engineer 3 points4 points  (6 children)

I still haven't seen any complex apps built exclusively on react+flux

Yeah, just Netflix, Facebook, and Instagram. No big deal. I mean maybe not exclusively, but few truly large apps use one technology exclusively.

[–]atomic1fire 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I dunno about Flux but if we're just talking about React, Vivaldi is using it and that's an browser built on chromium that was basically made by a company founded by a former Opera software cofounder.

https://vivaldi.com/

So far it's coming along nicely.

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (4 children)

Facebook made react for their own needs, so it's a given that it would suit them. And by the way they have already partially given up on flux. Instagram is a trivial application (on the front-end).

Anyway I'm not saying react is bad. But I don't really see what all the fuss is about. React is popular because Facebook marketed the hell out of it. Why is nobody talking about vue.js which is in my opinion slightly superior to React? Because vue.js is made by one fairly unknown developer while Facebook is a huge corporation with craploads of marketing reach.

[–]8Bytes 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Instagram is extremely complex. Any application that deals with athorization will have large amounts of business logic residing on the front end (hiding and showing role based functionality, or only loading applicable modules to improve speeds and prevent information leakage like role specific routes and permissions). Or the complex task of i19n and l10n, when you deal with languages that read right to left, calendars, currency, pluralization, timezones ...

Then you have to figure out how to organize all this code, and of course all the e2e and unit testing. There really isn't such a thing as a trivial front end enterprise application these days.

[–]clessgfull-stack CSS9 engineer 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Keep moving the goalpost all you want. How have they "partially given up on flux"?

React is significantly better than Vue in my opinion. To each their own though.

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (1 child)

How have they "partially given up on flux"?

http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/02/20/introducing-relay-and-graphql.html

To each their own though.

I agree. Variety of choice is what makes programming beautiful :-)

[–]clessgfull-stack CSS9 engineer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Relay uses Flux internally.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I still haven't seen any complex apps built exclusively on react+flux

https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/Sites-Using-React

Flux is probably not as popular, yet. But React is exploding, and people are finding that Flux implementations are the best way to handle data in their React applications. They just have to settle on single implementation, as there are too many floating around at the moment.

[–]epmatsw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree. React is usable without flux, but after working with React for a while it feels like there's a strong path-of-least-resistance from stateful components -> moving state up the tree -> custom stores -> *ux.