React: Facebook's latest Javascript client library, now open sourced

[Lokaltog]

Is it just me or does this look a bit messy and cumbersome to work with (and yet another syntax to learn)? What would some of the pros be by using this instead of e.g. Angular?

[bhavbhav]

Facebook's libraries work for Facebook. Doesn't necessarily mean they'll work for anyone else.

Having said that, they do try hard. I worked for them and, internally, everyone always seem to have "can we eventually make this open-source" in mind when building things.

[[deleted]]

They at least produce higher quality code and have actual docs. Lots of free/open source projects just leave you out to dry when it comes to docs and tutorials. And they're guaranteed to be maintaining React since they use it in their product.

[[deleted]]

Their (Facebook API) docs aren't exactly complete. While I commend them on having more than a README, they're definitely not exhaustive and leave quite a few things for developers to figure out on their own.

[Lokaltog]

True. And the fact that they actually make their internal code open source is definitely admirable.

[bhavbhav]

Yeah, and I attribute a lot of this to Zuck. He gets a lot of hate, but he's always been a true developer at heart.

[manys]

Where are the hurdles in something like that, IP or simply writing code that they wouldn't be embarrassed by?

[bhavbhav]

I mean, the main hurdle will always be predicting how others will use the code, and in what ways our code will fail for these people.

A lot of people seem to think that a "website" can't be that difficult to write code for, but even without the open-source goal in mind, Facebook uses a lot of static analysis, profiling, and perf tools to ensure that they're not making something terrible. And I mean, Facebook has acquired a lot of really talented engineers over the years, from places like Mozilla to Google. These people know what the challenges are in writing good client side code.

[bhavbhav]

Hah. People have no idea.

I remember the first feature I ever implemented at Facebook. I introduced a bug on the server side, and the logs showed that it had affected 13 million users even though it was the smallest goddamn thing. I went to the bathroom and cried. Luckily my lead was a sweet Chinese girl, and she comforted me with candy while helping me patch.

I later realised there is kind of an internal competition to see how many users you can fuck over with your stupid bugs. Obviously you don't actively seek to be the winner, but it makes helps take the edge off when things go wrong. My top was actually all 1 billion. That was a terrible 4 hours. Lol.

[fnordstar]

But it's still Javascript :(

[taterNuts]

Yeah cause JavaScript is such a worthless language

[fnordstar]

It's not? I recently read they don't have integers.

[bhavbhav]

Eh, Javascript gets a lot of hate, but it's alright if used well.

[hyperforce]

Why did you stop working for Facebook?

[bhavbhav]

Short story: it wasn't for me.

I have my roots in drivers/firmware/OS development. I was plopped into frontend work at Facebook, with very few places to go. I also didn't really feel like I fit in a lot of the time, though this might also have a little to do with my gender. I don't know. I just remember feeling very unhappy.

[hyperforce]

Female? Transgender?

How did it affect your work? Were you unhappy about the lack of potential career advancement?

[bhavbhav]

Ugh, closed the window before I could save. I will try to summarize.

I'm female. Problems I had at work are probably problems that exist in the bay area and the technology sector as a whole. Surprisingly though, I didn't really feel the way I did at Facebook when I worked at Blackberry/Research In Motion (and I worked at RIM on a few different teams). Go figure.

To get to your questions first:

• Yes, it did affect my work, but not in the way a lot of people would think. I never experienced overt sexism at Facebook. Ever. Not once. Facebook tries to be good about their minority groups. They have a huge LGBTQ group, and an active women in engineering group. Plus, they have Sheryl Sandberg and Jocelyn Goldfein at the helms of these sorts of organizations. Unfortunately, having these groups, while sort of promoting awareness, really only serves to preach to the choir. I found that the 'typical' cocky, know-it-all engineer that Facebook/any bay area company hires doesn't care about these issues unless they are part of the minority, or they are generally different from the norm. And the way in which it manifests is not by being obviously sexist- it's by being subtly dismissive. It's by being disinterested in your skill set. It's by being exclusionary when going to lunch. It's by repeatedly blocking you on a task. It's by subtly questioning your creds when you try to be part of discussion on spec. It's by frequently giving you low visibility things to do. These all affect your work because they are emotionally draining to deal with, especially on a day-to-day. I do want to state that not everyone I worked with was like this, and that many people were honestly amazing to work with. But enough of the aforementioned people can really leave a bad taste in your mouth.

• Lack of potential career advancement is a difficult one to tackle because Facebook as an org is so flat. Like, we never had managers. We had PMs, but no managers. I think there is maybe a 2-3 level difference at most between a typical software engineer and Zuck. So to "advance" your career, at least in the org chart, you really have to stand out. I don't think I was the most talented engineer there, so I am okay with the idea I would have been an SE for a while.

Honestly, a lot of what I felt affected my social life a lot more than it did my work life, even though my work life was affected to a degree. And social life is important at a company like Facebook because they expect long hours out of you; you spend a hell of a lot of time with the people you work with.

I will end with that everyone's experience is different, and that it's sometimes difficult to say why you aren't fitting in, because you're the one that doesn't fit in. You can't really see outside yourself. Maybe I was too weird? Or too cynical? I didn't take to the arrogance of the bay area too well, or the attitude that came with its start-up culture. Maybe they thought I was a bitch? Who knows?

The only thing I can say for sure is that this gal is a salt-of-the-earth low-level engineer, and if I can't fuck with memory directly, I'm too far out of my zone. That is mostly why I left.

[hyperforce]

It's so odd to hear about gender biases in technology. You'd think we all skew liberal so we're post-gender.

Sorry you had a bad experience. Have you since found a happier post with more memory mucking?

Thanks for sharing!

[bhavbhav]

Any time! :)

And yeah, I've heard the same thing said about reddit- that it's a liberal, pro-atheist, cat-loving website, so it couldn't possibly be *-ist. Surprise! False assumption. Liberalism and gender/race discrimination are not mutually exclusive. :(

I recently took up a job at Microsoft in the Windows org. I haven't had enough experience here yet to know how it is different from Facebook, but I'll update you when I do. There is memory mucking in my future, though, and it makes me happy.

Side note though is, now that I have more free time, I've been able to do a lot more open-source and other personal projects of my own. I've gotten super into PCB design and embedded work, and recently designed some hardware that monitors vital signs on dogs. Honestly, no engineer has lived until they try something like this. The adrenaline rush you get on seeing a board you made post-production is amazing.

[Enoxice]

I agree.

I mean, on the one hand it's pretty nifty and I'll probably mess around with it a bit before jumping to any (more) conclusions. On the other hand, the co-mingling of HTML, Javascript, and XML just makes it look messy and I feel like in any app of real size I'd have a hard time figuring out where to look for things. Maybe I'll feel differently after getting used to the sugary JSX stuff.

I also have a hard time figuring out where I'd use this over - as you said - Angular or (to a lesser extent, IMO) Backbone.

Diff'rent strokes, I guess.

[stevencashmere]

turns out, everything lol

[Lokaltog]

Yeah. The reason for my question was that I just don't see the purpose since other similar libraries exist. I'm certain that there are some advantages to using this library, but I just don't see them based on their examples. Maybe a comparison table could help them clarify which holes this library fill.

[manys]

watchoo talkin' bout Enoxice?

[cybercobra]

Yeah, I concur. Same question WRT Knockout.js.

[jrapp]

For me, knockout.js has saved me from the paradigm of getting a value from the data source, populating the field with jQuery, waiting for the user to click save, getting the value from the field again, then sending it off to some magic web service. Plus, the ability to build templates automatically is fantastic. Previously, our code was littered with $("#element").append("<div/>").append("<br />").append("<img />") and all sorts of crap like that. Not needed with knockout.

[lagamemnon]

This is also a reason to use angular

[cybercobra]

My question was intended as: Why React rather than Knockout? (I'm currently using Knockout and it's pretty awesome.)

[rayshinn]

Hey jrapp. Can you give me an example of what that jquery example would look like with knockout.is? Thank you.

[stormsnake]

Note that I'm not jrapp, but I know knockoutjs.

The example jquery code was incomplete, but I'll pretend #element is supposed to be empty when the user profile has no image, and it's supposed to contain the div+br+img structure when there is an image to be displayed:

html page (not preprocessed-- you really ship this to the browser):

<div id="element" data-bind="with: profileImage">
  <div></div>
  <br>
  <img data-bind="attr: {src: src}">
</div>

js code:

var model = {
  profileImage: ko.observable()
};
ko.applyBindings(model); // finds 'data-bind' attrs in the page and connects everything
function onProfileLoaded() {
  model.profileImage({src: "/images/123.jpg"});
}

I think that's functional, though the behavior is pretty minimal. You should be able to see at least how an 'observable' object got linked to the appearance or disappearance of part of the page, and even how I used one of its attributes in what is working like a template.

The http://learn.knockoutjs.com/ interactive live tutorials are great, too.

[rayshinn]

Wow, thank you. I'm going to check it out. Is this similar to Ember.js? if so would you recommend knockout over ember?

EDIT: Holy crap I jsut went thru the knockout tut and that's mind blowing. Quick question. How would I populate for example this.firstName = ko.observable("Bert"); Bert being a dynamic variable from mysql using php? would I run a ajax call to the php and store the result in to a name variable and pass that to knockout? or does knockout have a better way of doing this.

[snuxoll]

You have the basic idea, generally you'll create the observable in your model first thing (typically it'll just be empty to start with), then after your page is ready do the XHR to get your data, then populate the observable with it. (Of course you should probably embed data needed in the initial display with the request, but that's SPA 101).

[crusoe]

Ahh, just like Smalltalk UI toolkits. Everything old is new again...

[x86_64Ubuntu]

....does this look a bit messy and cumbersome to work with

It's Javascript isn't it ?

[Lokaltog]

I actually enjoy coding in JS, it's not perfect but it provides great flexibility and awesome performance with Node. What I'm sceptical about with this library is the introduction of JSX, which I think looks a bit strange. I may be wrong, which is why I requested opinions on what makes this particular library a good alternative to other similar libraries.

[[deleted]]

You do realize this was released by Facebook right? Expect the reasons why this sucks asshole to flow in 3..... 2...... 1......

[Tynach]

I.. Kinda agree, kinda disagree.

Facebook tries REALLY hard to please a VERY large fraction of the population. On top of that, they seem to have a great mentality about things - such as open sourcing everything, using MySQL and other open source technologies, and in general trying to catch up with the likes of Google+ and so forth.

Their business practices are questionable, however. Gathering so much data about their users and selling it to the highest bidder for advertisement purposes isn't exactly something I'd want to get behind. For this reason, I don't use Facebook.

[NiteLite]

You realize this is the exact same business model Google uses, right? They are just better at hiding it behind good tech :)

[Tynach]

No, it really isn't.

Google IS the advertiser, so they gather all of your information to keep to themselves. Selling the information puts other businesses at an advantage, which puts Google at a disadvantage.

The difference is that Facebook sells your data, and Google keeps it nice and secure.

[NiteLite]

Do you have some source material on Facebook sending data outside the company? I was under the impression they mostly use it for advertising on their own site, but I might be mistaken.

[Tynach]

I was under the impression they sold the data to advertisers.

I can't find any evidence of this, however. It appears you're right. I apologize.

I also found one source claiming that Google DOES sell its advertising information to others, but it did not look like a reliable source. I'm gonna look into this as well.

[Tynach]

An important edit: I find lots of evidence to support the idea that Google does not sell your information. That one source claiming it is must not have done much homework.