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Comment by thejameskyle | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm one of the devs on this team. Let me know if you have any questions.

It's a super awesome feeling to have open sourced this after working on it for months, and I think we've done some interesting things. So I want to share our ideas and opinions. I'm hoping to publish more about them in the coming weeks.

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I couldn't figure out from the blog post why you switched from backbone to react. Could you talk a bit about the reasons?

I left them out because many others have blogged about the same reasons. But this is the biggest reason:

We have a lot of complexity in our view/component layer where we trying to bring simple workflows to very complicated technical features. Backbone (even with Marionette) doesn't have a strong view composition story, essentially avoiding setting up any patterns.

React's composition pattern is so strong that its hard not to abstract things. The complexity is still there but its easy to follow and extremely simple to test (especially with redux).

There are more reasons, but I have to go now. Hopefully that suffices

With regard to adopting React, coming from Backbone in the past. I've found that it simplifies the view layer, particularly when it comes to extracting shared functionality. It's not to say that you can't do this in a Backbone application, far from it. However, it's less work in a React application because of how React enables composition.

There were two primary drivers the led me to adopt Redux.

1) When working with multiple services to build a single view, Backbone models are the wrong abstraction. Redux allows you to work with arbitrary data structures without the need to deal with hooking up events between nested models/collections. It also prevents overfetching or having to resort to nested models when a single endpoint serves multiple views.

2) Managing complex asynchronous flows becomes easier when there's a single source of truth.

The backends for frontends pattern that Netflix and Thoughtworks have written about is another approach to dealing with the multiple services issue, but in reality, it's not an option for every project.

Thanks for open sourcing this. I know that can be hard to get through legal and can be something that is hard for people. Great to see this!

CloudFlare was actually very encouraging. I emailed our internal open source legal mailing list and had responses from our CEO and Head of Product Strategy within 5 mins that were really excited about it. There was a brief concern about phishing, but that was quickly resolved. It was more difficult writing the blog post than getting legal's approval :P

Now, I'm hurt, James. I replied

    From: John Graham-Cumming
    Subject: Re: open sourcing cf-ui
    Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2016 07:15:56 +0000

    This is fantastic! I am really happy to see open source 
    stuff from www and would love to see this open sourced soon 
    with a nice blog post describing why we wrote this, what 
    the transition was like, what the components do. 

    We've done a tremendous amount of blogging and open 
    sourcing of systems level stuff and it's great that we can   
    do the same here. Super to showcase all our technology. 

    Really nice.

But, oh, those guys reply and that's what you remember?

:-)

You weren't in that 5 min cutoff. And no excuses about being on the other side of the world

Wow, I'm jealous. Every time I've tried to get stuff open sourced at the company I'm with I get blocked by legal usually they just don't get what the technology is, like kernel bypass PF_RING network processor :( one day. Glad to hear you had a good experience though

It may be that our legal counsel is too busy making dad jokes to care about me open sourcing some JavaScript.

+1 can confirm

I'm amazed that you even have an open source legal mailing list.

I was shocked too, honestly. But we are always looking for projects we can open source, so it's very useful.

It's dead easy to open source stuff at CloudFlare. We have an internal mailing list. Email was sent on March 11, 2016 requesting this. Everyone signed off (including legal) that day.

Why the quarter delay in making the source available?

Thats about how long it takes me to write a blog post :P

Also I was trying to get a number of things in a good place, like https://lernajs.io/

We were busy doing other stuff.

Heh, yeaah boss. OBVIOUSLY I do TONS of things. Where would I even begin to talk about all the things I do? There's just so many! No time to open source something with all the things I definitely do...

closes 30 browser tabs

The demo page causes a crash and reload loop on Safari iPhone iOS 9.3.2

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