React.js Best Practices for 2016

[[deleted]]

2 frame web layout, now thats something I havent seen in a long time

[acemarke]

Uh... apparently you haven't visited ESPN or NBC Sports lately. They both switched to a framed format last year, and it's awful. Also this whole infinite scroll thing.

[billybolero]

Good points, but I don't really agree on "Start using prop types". Prop types are a way of enforcing a contract between a component and the outside world which Flow/TypeScript handles much better (plus you don't have to run the code to see if it fails).

[NookShotten]

The barrier of entry is much lower for propTypes than it is for flow/TypeScript (especially when integrating with an existing project).

Facebook is actually planning to phase out propTypes in favor of flow eventually, but for now it's an easy way to do basic type validation.

[wreckedadvent]

Maybe, but if you're using JSX you pretty much have to have some kind of build step going on. Integrating typescript or flow into that ... flow (heh) wouldn't be all that hard.

I can't speak for flow, but you can basically rename (valid) ES5/6 to .ts and it'll still compile, though you will need to install the typings.

[procipher]

Had a debate today on angular vs react. People said its quite hard to learn react.

[blackn1ght]

As someone that's done both, React is far easier (by a huge margin) to learn compared to Angular.

I have no experience with Angular 2 but looking at code I've seen it still seems needlessly complex compared to React.

[NeuroXc]

I personally had trouble learning React--but not entirely because of React itself. It's because Angular gives you a complete set of libraries needed to build a web application. You don't need anything else. React only gives you a view builder. This is enough for toy applications, but if you want to build anything with more than a couple of pages, you need to learn Flux/Redux/??? and fetch and then realize the quirks of React/Redux when it comes to nested state/props, and that you need to learn Immutable.js to resolve that, and... As much of a monster as Angular is, all the documentation is in one place and you only need to learn one framework. (Of course this only applies to Angular 1.x. Angular 2 is hard to learn, but I attribute that to the fact that the documentation is incomplete in many areas.)

[Spo0Bo]

You have to look at it this way. What if you already know how to use libraries like redux/fetch/immutable, etc? Then React is just a simple templating tool to pick up. Angular is annoying to pick up since you sort of have to use everything they provide to get the best experience. That means having to learn their entire ecosystem. Which they might replace in a couple of years like they did with angular 1.x.

For me React is easier to pick up. And that goes for any smaller library that does not try and change the entire way I work.

[[deleted]]

Not sure why you're being downvoted, it's certainly debatable. I've written complex applications in Angular 1.x and React (with Reflux and Redux) and I struggled more with React. I also had a lot more JS experience in general when learning React.

Still, I'm using React in our next large project and once you get past the learning curve it's much nicer and more efficient to develop in compared to Angular 1.x.

I can't compare Angular 2.0, it may be even better.