I get that for sure. I've been avoiding learning React because I keep waiting for the space to settle down. I was very interested to see how the Rails folks are talking about their latest version: https://rubyonrails.org/2021/12/15/Rails-7-fulfilling-a-visi...
In particular there's a theme of JS being totally optional: "Rails 7 takes advantage of all of these advances to deliver a no-Node default approach to the front end – without sacrificing neither access to npm packages nor modern JavaScript in the process." "The same approach is taken with CSS bundlers that rely on Node. [...] If you’re willing to accept the complexity of a Node dependency, you can pre-configure your new Rails app to use any of them"
That seems like a smart goal. They're not trying to go it alone, but they're clearly trying to draw some boundaries that keep the JS chaos/complexity at the edges.
React feels pretty settled now, it's been out for 10+ years, hooks and functional components have become the standard.
If you want to learn it I think it's at a mature enough place.
Popular libraries like redux have been rebuilt to use hooks and simplify the integration.
I'd also check out Remix[0] if you wanted to get into a React framework. It's fairly new but extremely promising and easy to get up and running and even deployed anywhere (express server, cloud flare workers, deno, etc)
> hooks and functional components have become the standard
Now if only the React ecosystem settled on standards too, that would be wonderful.
But alas. There is flux, redux, mobx, hooks, routes, sagas, thunk, observable, styled components, emotion, tailwind, react-antd, axios, fetch and so on and so forth. Edit: on top of, obviously, webpacker, grunt, npm, yarn etc.
Contrary to e.g. Rails, none of these come with React. You'll need to organize it all yourself (or go with something as react-boilerplate). You'll need at least some of these pieces to have something workable very early on. Things like redux or saga are not some "we've grown out of vanilla React and need additional tooling", they are essential to do things that practically every app needs: pages, communication with a backend, some styling, some consistency and deploying it to a public server.
There's a lot here that feels like you're purposefully conflating to make it seem more confusing than it is and a lot of what you mention is also an issue in Ruby on Rails. It's also a false comparison to begin with. Ruby on Rails is more equivalent to Nextjs or Remix.
When I had to learn a little ruby on rails I found the convention over configuration far harder to wrap my head around. It's quite nice to be able to see for yourself exactly how pieces are wired up and configured instead of having it magically done for you and dictated to you that it has to be done this way.
There are standards in some of what you mentioned. Mainly hooks, fetch, npm, and css.
Ruby doesn't "solve" css either, you're just using regular css files which you can do trivially in React as well (<Foo style={myStyles}/> and define myStyles as an plain old javascript object wherever you want - same file or not) or just include the stylesheet on the server response.
The rest of it, state management, webpack vs grunt, etc is pretty simple to select from and even in all that there are obvious choices - redux, webpack, npm that are certainly considered standard.
With rails, there are really only a handful conventions, and while they take a little time to learn (table names plural, model names singular, controllers plural, name view files based on controller/action, foreign keys names in the obvious way) and that's about it. Once you have that you can look at a URL and know exactly where the code is. That is really valuable and worth a little effort.
There isn't much magic in rails, and just stepping through the methods in a debugger makes everything pretty clear if you do want to know exactly how everything is wired up.
My point, however, was that this is not obvious for anyone starting with React.
This is caused by the fact that React is "no batteries included", which means that you have to find the right batteries at a moment when you lack all knowledge about batteries in the first place. You search "how to send to backend" and saga's pop up, explaining why they are better than useEffect or redux or whatever (at a moment you may not even know useEffect or its downsides).
Compare that to Rails which has "all batteries included" (and which is a nightmare in itself, too, though), where all those choices are made for you. You can choose to ignore Rails' testing suite and instead erect an rspec setup next to it, but you'll do so consiously. Because that moment when you asked yourself "how do I test in rails" the One True Way was there, configured, ready for use and documented.
Both have tradeoffs and pros and cons. But the React community (with tutorials, this weeks best practices, breakspeed iterations of tooling) is not helping here. At all.
Exactly. It's discussions like this that are exactly what I'm thinking of when I say that React still doesn't feel settled to me. There are quite a lot of people who say, "Oh, just do it this way". But I don't have much sense that they are all saying the same thing and will still be saying the same thing in a year.
There are some default choices in Rails that I disagree with. E.g., I think it's too database-focused, and I build things that often aren't. But I still know I can get started with Rails and expect it all to just work. I know that people with Rails experience will be able to jump in without much pain. And then if I depart from the standard path, I have a good sense of where I might get into trouble.
Working on a project with a significant number of sagas, I have to heartily agree with you.
There are some very clever things you can do with them, but this really need to know all the ins and outs of it first, and by the time you've learned them you implemented a giant nightmare.
We've been trying to generally discourage Redux users from using sagas in most cases. I've always felt that they were absolutely overkill for basic data fetching scenarios, and this is even more true now that data fetching libraries like RTK Query and React Query exist.
Where sagas _do_ still make sense is highly complex async workflows, including responding to dispatched actions, "background thread"-type behavior, and lots of debouncing/throttling/etc.
But yes, I've heard of plenty of cases where sagas made a codebase unreadable, and it's a shame that they get so heavily pushed by some early Redux users.
FWIW, I've actually been working on designing a new "action listener middleware" that we'd like to ship in an upcoming version of Redux Toolkit. It started off as very simple callbacks, but by adding a few key primitive functions like `take`, `condition`, and `delay` I think we've been able to to come up with something that can handle maybe 75% of what sagas can do with a much smaller API surface and bundle size. I'd love to have you or anyone else using Redux take a look and give us some feedback on the current API design and let us know if there's other use cases it ought to cover:
The last time I did web development, I used Angular 1.2 or something like that. I had some forms and many different views that talked to some REST APIs.
It was never clear to me why/when I would need React. I read and worked through some tutorials years ago, and while the reactive/one way flow pattern was nice, I never had a problem with Angular.
I recognize there have been many versions of Angular since then. And there are several web development frameworks, complex build tooling, etc. etc.
Meanwhile, I’m still writing services in Java that handle 20,000 requests per second for a service that brings in revenue in the billions of dollars a year. And I’m writing C++ (very straightforward, no templates, few uses of pointers, etc) for cross platform mobile code. I have some Spark pipelines all written in Scala.
Meanwhile the web stack continues to evolve… new technologies all just for rendering web pages. I don’t understand why. Admittedly there’s far more complexity in our use cases today than the HTML I was writing in 1999, but much of it is unnecessary bloat from bored developers.
Sometimes running into AngularJS was not too bad of an experience, since it's relatively simplistic when compared to what's needed to get it running (no complicated toolchain, such as with TS -> JS).
But most of the times it's a pain, because of it not scaling well to larger projects. I've actually seen projects where controllers grow to the length of thousands of lines because the developers didn't feel comfortable with introducing new ones in the pre-existing codebase, due to how the scoping works, due to how they'd need to set up the data models and care about initialization of everything, as well as custom integrations with validation libraries and other JS cruft (due to it not quite being "battieries included", like the new Angular is).
Now personally, i really liked how they did error messages (which gave you URLs that you could navigate to, with a bit of context in them; though it would be better with a locally hosted docs server), but a lot of things were awkward, such as their binding syntax: https://blog.krawaller.se/posts/dissecting-bindings-in-angul...
Luckily, AngularJS seems to finally be dead, so we'll get to migrate to something else soon, hopefully. And the projects that won't will be red flags enough for the people who don't like such challenges to turn the other way - truly a litmus test of sorts.
It hasn’t been out for 10+ years. Even if you count the prototype FaxJS predecessor it’s barely 10 years old, and that was only a Facebook internal project.
Any of them will allow you to build a complex system - vue, svelte, react and others.
It's more important to pick one and just get started with it. You can do some reading about how they're different or their different philosophies but they all work.
It's more important to get started. If you want to build something to learn a skill to get a job, react is the most popular. If you want to build something to learn something new, any of them are a good choice. Just get started.
Yea, I'm really glad they dropped Webpacker. It was the worst "Webpack abstraction" I've had to deal with, and the only documentation was always out of date and confusing.
I think it's important to be a little careful with the terminology here: JS itself is not optional, really. If you want in on Hotwire and the rest, it's inevitable that it's there.
What's optional is whether you need to use node or npm itself as a developer-facing tool, and needing ESM support in the browser for the way they've done it means it's only relatively recently that that's been practical.
In particular there's a theme of JS being totally optional: "Rails 7 takes advantage of all of these advances to deliver a no-Node default approach to the front end – without sacrificing neither access to npm packages nor modern JavaScript in the process." "The same approach is taken with CSS bundlers that rely on Node. [...] If you’re willing to accept the complexity of a Node dependency, you can pre-configure your new Rails app to use any of them"
That seems like a smart goal. They're not trying to go it alone, but they're clearly trying to draw some boundaries that keep the JS chaos/complexity at the edges.