> When I first saw React.js, I had a quick glance and thought that it was cool, they finally figured out how to do a Cocoa-like MVC UI framework in JavaScript.
> Overall, though, the use of a true MVC UI framework seemed like a great step forward
The author keeps saying 'MVC' as if it ever made any sense in the context of React. The old react docs used to quip that react was the v of mvc, until this notion was scraped entirely; and although one might perhaps suggest that props and templating is a v, and state is conceivably an m, there has never been anything concrete one could point out and argue that it is a c.
> The old react docs used to quip that react was the v of mvc, until this notion was scraped entirely
I'm still treating React as the "V of MVC", other things handled by other things, and seems I'm not alone with this.
I think at one point React got so popular, and the team grew, so they figured they need to expand the scope for it to continue growing, and Facebook continued to throw resources at it, and as we know, things that don't change are clearly dead (sarcasm), so APIs changed, the scope grew and eventually they stopped marketing it as the view-layer, and instead push it as a full thing, when it still clearly was just a view library, not a framework.
I am also using React as the "V in MVC". It is the most sensible way to use React. I also only use class components. My code is way simpler than React code these days. The only React concepts I need are props, state, and the lifecycle methods.
React was originally designed to be the "V in MVC". What happened then is the community took it in a different direction: specifically ReactRouter.
It's really a company/team culture thing. Either you end up grouped together with people who always chase the latest fads and cargocult their way to their promotions, or you end up with the "Justify everything" camp where anything new is shit on.
Ideally, you end up in a company/team that sits somewhere in the middle, faithfully evaluating the trade-offs of everything, and don't spend 60% of their time reading the latest news from blogs and social media.
Right. Anything other than the most popular way of doing things is "wrong" to them. That's how mistakes get established. This non-questioning attitude seems especially true among frontend developers.
> The author keeps saying 'MVC' as if it ever made any sense in the context of React.
1. That part is clearly about my first superficial impression and how I later discovered those impressions were...let's say "insufficient", at least in the context of how React is now presented.
2. I later listened to an interview with Pete Hunt, one of the original creators on The Future of Coding
I was once again surprised, this time pleasantly, that building an MVC-style framework like the desktop ones (Cocoa, Win-flavor-of-the-month, etc.) was exactly what they were aiming for.
Their implementation of those concepts was different, but it was what they were aiming for. I don't know what exactly happened, but it is a common occurrence that adopters of a technology are much more religious about it than the initial creators, who tend to be more pragmatic.
And of course, the humorous point that MVC solves exactly the supposed problems of MVC that React is trying (and trying, and trying, and trying...) to solve just never gets old.
>The old react docs used to quip that react was the v of mvc
I remember this! Vue was meant to be the same thing (I suspect Vue's name comes from "view"). It was meant to be super light and then they started adding more and more non-core tools until they went full Angular. Which is ironic as Angular's full on batteries was always used against it
It is funny that MVC as a concept started as a backend server-rendered pages where the V was what rendered the HTML, C was the business logic which pulled data from the M which was the database + adapters.
When bending it to apply to React + JSON-apis it kinda applies, but it is such a different approach that conceptually it is not relevant in the presence of a lot of client state.
"Trygve Reenskaug created MVC while working on Smalltalk-79 as a visiting scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the late 1970s. He wanted a pattern that could be used to structure any program where users interact with a large, convoluted data set. His design initially had four parts: Model, view, thing, and editor. After discussing it with the other Smalltalk developers, he and the rest of the group settled on model, view, and controller instead."
A model is supposed to be a domain model, the business logic of the app, not simply a database access layer. Your logic should reside in the model layer, sort of like building a library of classes and functions that you can reuse. That's why in the server-side world people use the term "fat models" to describe this type of use.
> When bending it to apply to React + JSON-apis it kinda applies
There is no bending, the original MVC applied to separating the business logic from rendering views and capturing input events, because this separation promotes code reuse. You can write many different views and controllers in your UI that show and react to user's input but still talk to the same underlying logical model.
I like this github repo to understand how MVC applies to programs with graphical interfaces. It's JS and HTML, so it's easy to follow.
> It is funny that MVC as a concept started as a backend server-rendered pages where the V was what rendered the HTML, C was the business logic which pulled data from the M which was the database + adapters.
I've got a CD from 1995 for Watcom C/C++. I purchased this compiler and IDE for a large (for me) sum of money and used it to create many Win32 applications.
I recall that that the help pages (which were extensive) came along with some non-reference documentation, which gave a quick overview of MVC for writing Win3.1 and Win95 applications, so MVC was already well-known in GUI systems even back then.
> Overall, though, the use of a true MVC UI framework seemed like a great step forward
The author keeps saying 'MVC' as if it ever made any sense in the context of React. The old react docs used to quip that react was the v of mvc, until this notion was scraped entirely; and although one might perhaps suggest that props and templating is a v, and state is conceivably an m, there has never been anything concrete one could point out and argue that it is a c.