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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

React: reinventing Angular one step at a time. And in more repos.

https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/two-way-binding-helper...

Angular: for people who think programming UIs is all about two way data binding.

The two way binding helpers are just there for people who want to try React without giving up two way binding (eg. people coming from Angular). They are not the recommended way of doing things, and that page says as much.

The documentation seems to be the other way around: it discourages ReactLink for React newbies, not power users.

> If you're new to the framework, note that ReactLink is not needed for most applications

They're trying to direct newbies away from mistakenly thinking ReactLink is the 'right way'. Seems to only exist so people coming from two way data binding centric frameworks won't immediately discard React out of hand because it 'can't do two way data binding', before they get to know the framework's ideas and realise that two way data binding is usually a bad idea anyway; a notion which is fairly central to React's design. As an experienced React dev, I've never seen ReactLink in real-world use.

See the docs page called Thinking in React [1] and grep through all the mentions of 'data flow' and you'll see how one way (circular) data flow is how React is intended to be used.

[1] https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/thinking-in-react.html

You're probably right; it's probably just oddly phrased documentation that's accurate for new and experienced devs.

Yes. We're actually pulling ReactLink out completely soon since so few people use it. It's easy to replicate the behavior yourself, anyway.

React as just a view layer is amazing, but I agree that Flux/Redux + React Router etc. feel like they're reinventing Angular.

The two-way binding is definitely a feature that needs to be used cautiously. I'm not using it in my current project, but it would remove so much boilerplate for us, when it comes to forms. I would only use it for complex controlled forms, never to control application state.

Redux / Flux / React Router have absolutely nothing in common with Angular. It might benefit you to look into each of these things with some attention because they are vastly simpler once understood.

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