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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

> Having just attended EmberCamp a week ago, I was excited about Ember CLI. Ember users have a great “getting started” experience thanks to a curated set of tools united under a single command-line interface.

This is one of the best things about Ember. `ember new`, `ember serve`, ember generate component my-component`, `ember build`, `ember deploy`, `ember install`. It's opinionated but it lets you get productive right off the bat. I tried React but after a couple of days I just couldn't get it working, waaay to many options. So I switched to Ember and haven't looked back.

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Kind of interesting to think about the two projects and how they diverge based on the core developers.

Ember is made by folks who work on / for small and medium companies[1]. They don't have the build infrastructure Facebook does and are able to create an anointed solution in Ember-CLI because they'll use it daily. React is stuck in a place where the environment it's developed in is unique from what any other user will see. It's difficult to solve a problem when you're not in the space.

EDIT:

This leads to things beyond CLIs too. React is still billed as just a view library instead of a solution for building an entire app. There's no official path from view layer -> complete app (no guidance for data flow, how to communicate with the server, server side rendering, routing on the client).

I think the React team needs to take a little more responsibility for the eco-system it created. You can't call it just a view library when most use cases use it to develop entire applications. You have to provide more guidance, you can't fallback to Facebook not using it that way as the default response. In my opinion most of the Great Javascript Fatigue of 2015-16 was caused by users trying to fill in the blanks left by the React team and producing one solution after another (and quickly abandoning ship as something iteratively better was released).

1 - Tom, Yehuda at tilde.io

The idea that Ember is made by/for small and medium sized companies is a bit dated. Several Ember and Ember-CLI core contributors have and continue to work at larger companies like LinkedIn and Yahoo.

In particular, LinkedIn has been using Ember (with Ember-CLI) for over a year now and has found a lot of benefits from its adoption. Having a build system and conventions that a community maintains lets us focus on building applications instead of tooling (though we still have our share of internal tools). We also can give back to the community for things which matter more for applications "at scale". LI, for instance, funded a good portion of the FastBoot work and has been a key driver in the Ember Engines effort recently.

All that to say, Ember (and Ember-CLI) can serve the needs of the whole spectrum of company/team sizes. While it still has some issues to sort out for larger applications, to say it isn't being influenced by large companies isn't really accurate any more.

Having worked at LinkedIn in the past, and seeing the state (stagnation) of their products both current and past, that's certainly not a ringing endorsement.

For anyone else curious about Ember Engines, I found the RFC provided a good explantion of the what and why:

https://github.com/tomdale/rfcs/blob/master/active/0000-engi...

> In my opinion most of the Great Javascript Fatigue of 2015-16 was caused by users trying to fill in the blanks left by the React team and producing one solution after another (and quickly abandoning ship as something iteratively better was released).

I agree wholeheartedly with this. And it's also why I love Ember, you get templates, routing, data access all working together with minimal configuration. I love Django and part of the reason why is that it's opinionated, and Ember is the same.

I found Ember was much harder to get started with than React.

More concepts, it's own CLI and build system, outdated docs. (I used it 2 years ago)

2 years ago is decades in the front-end world. If we make decisions today based on the state of things years ago, we'd be screwed.

And yet nothing much changed in the needs of webapps or in the Javascript language in the past two years.

And if we CAN'T "make decisions today based on the state of things years ago", then we're really screwed.

> And yet nothing much changed in the needs of webapps or in the Javascript language in the past two years.

But Ember has likely come a long way in that time - I think this is mcardleliam's point.

For me the creation of ember cli was like admiting their framework didn't work as good as they intended.

I'm sorry, Ember has come a huge way in 2 years. We've got 2.0, which was a big leap forward, a whole bunch of concepts were refined/removed or changed.

Also you're flat out wrong: Ember-cli isn't really anything to do with the framework. You don't need it to write Ember apps, it's just the communities command line tool for managing Ember projects. That's all.

This is only theoretically right.

Practically, there are Ember modules/extensions/features that require Ember-CLI to work or are a huge pain to work with, if you don't use the CLI...

for example animation libraries or glimmer.

> I think the React team needs to take a little more responsibility for the eco-system it created. You can't call it just a view library when most use cases use it to develop entire applications.

This is the reason I've embraced React. No, Facebook doesn't dictate how React fits into the rest of your app, and yes, it requires more effort up front to fit the pieces together. But judging by the popularity of React vs. kitchen-sink frameworks like Ember/React/etc., many developers seem willing to invest this effort.

Another comment here mentions Django; clearly some developers prefer the batteries included approach, but others don't. Is one preference right and the other wrong? Is any developer that doesn't adhere to your preference not taking "responsibility"?

It's a matter of encouraging health in a community. A lack of proper resources(which can be everything from documentation, tutorials, guides, libraries, to tools like Ember-CLI) can lead to mistakes in design and part of your community going off on a tangent, which leads to dead branches of development trees.

For example: While React still works for a lot of people who did things in ways advocated early on, the rise of Redux and functional reactive programming has caused the community to move in a direction many library authors weren't aware of when they began.

Is it anyone's fault? No, not really- but taking advantage of stewardship in a community can lead to better tools and resources that help newbies, take some of the work out of your hands, and keep quality for everyone as high as possible.

Absolutely agree. Innovation also is much easier when not boxed into one approach. It's like people are blaming react for the revolution it created on the client side.

This is a very accurate description of the problem. We’re optimistic though. I’m sure that the community will help make Create React App even better.

Sorry I edited in a WHOLE bunch more that you probably wouldn't agree with after your reply. Apologies!

Lol.

No, I still fully agree.

We think React is a tool to create great UIs, and UIs definitely include concerns like data fetching, etc. So some of this might make it into React in some form in the future.

In the meantime, you can also try out the official Flux library from Facebook (https://github.com/facebook/flux), or Redux (https://github.com/reactjs/redux), which offer great solutions for data manipulation and storage

I think he knows about those two options.

(The guy you're responding to is the creator of Redux) :-)

And now working for Facebook, one of the most active members of the react team at that.

Facebook created React.

Parent did not say Facebook itself is one of the most active members of the React team. They know Facebook created React.

They say that Dan, at Facebook, is one the most active members of the React team.

Who wants to tell him Dan wrote Redux?

Another great thing about ember-cli is that it has very quickly build around it a great community [1]. There are a lot of high quality, well tested addons that are easy to install and use, and it's easy to create your own as well.

[1]: https://emberobserver.com/

The best part about ember-cli is that everyone in the Ember community uses it. No one builds Ember apps without it. The opposite is true of any community/third party React CLI and it's a very powerful difference.

I'd say Webpack plays that role in the React community, just without a blessed and shared way to configure it.

> There's no official path from view layer -> complete app (no guidance for data flow, how to communicate with the server, server side rendering, routing on the client).

Every time I've decided to take an afternoon to poke at React this is where I've given up. I totally understand the model and appreciate how useful it can be but I've never been clear about how to actually hook it up to a backend that isn't just the generated demo scenario and what the requirements for my backend would be.

I think this is common. For me the front page and JSX threw me off. React was so un-opinionated that it can loose its appeal when it presents itself. Once I took an opinionated tutorial it became much clearer to me.

Since then I've used React in conjunction with Django, PHP/Laravel, converted large jQuery codebases to React and created frontend-only sites. I've not yet gone full-on with a NodeJS back-end and isomophic and that's fine for now.

Pass your data into a root component via props. Or use XHR requests to load data from your backend into your root component and manipulate them in your state. Let the data changes in the root component trickle down via props. Keep it simple with React loaded via a <script> tag and work from there.

No, that becomes a nightmare to maintain. Use Redux and connect any component that needs data to the store and get the data needed directly.

Not much more to say about this than that I do not agree, that I think flux-alikes are overused, and that it's just as easy to go too far the other direction, where nothing has any state even for trivial UI state concerns.

Agreed.

It seems like an afternoon is an awfully short time to allot to try a new framework / approach. I have definitely found lots in the Frontend world extremely frustrating at first given there are so many ways to do something, but it eventually clicks and makes sense.

I like React the way it is. It does one thing and does it well.

I suppose that's the price people will pay for needing the latest shiny (React) instead of the now old and boring Ember or AngularJs. And also thinking that the solution that works for Facebook is the one that is the best fit for a small startup, because someday they will reach Facebook's size.

To clarify, I like old and boring because it generates less JavaScript fatigue.

You don't think a legacy AngularJS project is full of "fatigue"? I shudder at the thought. Angular 1 is so awful, even the creator himself, Misko said it really wasn't intended to be used in this way.

I know the cool thing amongst us older folk are to say "Oh there goes them darn ole kids chasing their new toys again" but this is a case where very clearly one is much more suited for the job than the other. There's nothing wrong with a winner emerging. All of the "problems" people gripe about here about React can be avoided. I have posted this before, but I'll post it here again -- You wouldn't go to learn how to program Java by first learning how to configure maven, download dependencies, set up your project in an IDE, and then build and deploy your WAR through Jenkins into a J2EE container for "Hello World"

React has all the goodies provided by the community, but React IS just a library. If you want to learn React -- copy and paste the latest CDN, use the in-browser transformer, and freaking learn react. The tutorials are great, and so is the article "Thinking in react"

In any case, I haven't looked at this CLI, but if it's anything like the ember-cli I am sure it will help with the artificial gripes.

I don't think a legacy AngularJS project is necessarily full of any more fatigue than a React project will be in a few years time.

That's not really fair, though. It will be a React + x + y + z project, because as you said, React is just a library, and it needs other pieces to fill the gaps provided by some of these other frameworks.

I could be wrong, but it will take a couple years to tell. By then, React will be old news also.

Google has similar issues: if you're working on open source software, some tools have to be written twice, for internal and external developers.

The problem is that when frameworks develop these CLIs they tend to think only about the CLI users and it becomes larger and larger a requirement. Personally I'm a web developer, I don't want to be a React developer or an Ember developer, etc. so the more difficult you make it to use your stuff with normal web technologies the less I want to have anything to do with it.

> The problem is that when frameworks develop these CLIs they tend to think only about the CLI users and it becomes larger and larger a requirement

Well there are two ways to modify an Ember project: create a bunch of files in various places by hand, or run `ember whatever` and have it done for you. The CLI is the preferred way of doing it for a lot of (good) reasons but if you want a new component running `ember g my-component` and having it make the component JS file, the template and the tests for you in one fell swoop is awesome.

> so the more difficult you make it to use your stuff with normal web technologies the less I want to have anything to do with it.

I don't understand your point? What's a 'normal web technology'?

> I don't understand your point? What's a 'normal web technology'?

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

So you want to write HTML for a living? Ok, that's cool. But things have moved on a bit since then.

I mean, you're commenting on a thread about JS libraries that enable you to write awesome single page apps and saying you... don't want to write JS?

If I get you correctly then I used to be like you. "Eww, javascript". Then I was forced to use Ember for a project where I work and it is amazing, nothing that the app does could even remotely be done with HTML or even a bunch of jQuery spaghetti.

JavaScript is part of the HTML standard so I'm ok with that. What I'm not OK with is the expectation that I'm going to run 20 tools between editing a file and refreshing my browser.

They are saying that they aren't going to make the CLI a requirement and I hope that's the case, but my concern is that "use the CLI" is going to become the quick answer.

But that's the beauty of Ember: you run one tool. `ember`. Sure it uses Babel under the hood and a CSS preprocessor, but they are not separate tools really.

But what exactly is wrong with a CLI? I'm sorry but I really don't get your point. I mean, you kind of have to run one or more anyway if you want to do modern JS development because the JS you write isn't the JS that gets served to the browser (and for good reason). A CLI is a requirement and has been for a while now.

> A CLI is a requirement and has been for a while now.

It's really not, you can get by fine with a text editor and a web browser only. You can use regular web components (works unmodified in Chrome, there's a polyfill for other browsers) and get modularity and all of the things you need. You can add Polymer which, again, doesn't require anything but an editor and a browser.

Do you combine and minify your code? If so, how—presumably a command-line tool? It's totally fine to say that you'd prefer to keep your dependencies fairly minimal, but pinning that on whether you use a CLI or not seems a false dichotomy from here. The question is how much tooling and what it does for you, versus what it gives you. There is no doubt a real tradeoff there; there are costs to something like Ember CLI and there's no reason everyone should think those costs are worth embracing in every instance. But to be sure, there are upsides: being able to write ES2015, being able to pull in tests automatically, being able to run your entire test suite against the entire app without needing to write any glue to do that yourself... those things do have value, even if they're not particularly appealing to you. And all of those quite comfortably use the official specs to get that work done.

That said, someone could probably code a locally hosted react app that wrapped the CLI, and also indicated/logged what commands were run, output, errors, etc.

I love CLI, I live in vim and tmux as much as I can, but I think point and click interfaces are better for discovery, whereas a command line interface is better for reproducibility and therefore instructional learning.

One of React's big selling points is easy integration into existing apps so we don't plan to neglect non-CLI users.

Don't forget:

https://www.ember-fastboot.com/

Also two commands to get server rendering working.

Also don't forget: https://github.com/felixrieseberg/ember-electron One command to wrap your Ember app in Electron.

I personally use Django as a backend for my Ember stuff, which means I miss out on the whole fastboot experience. It does look really nice though.

Django / other backends aren't mutually exclusive with Fastboot. You can use them together.

I love the opinions I get with Ember and love it for getting small projects off the ground quickly and prototyped.

One thing I don't see a lot of is opinions in React on deploying. I wrote a blog post on deploying this new boiler using netlify, pretty straight forward. https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/22/deploy-react-in-30-s...

Having used Ember and React, this was my experience too. Ember lets you get up and running really fast. However, once you start doing anything outside of something it doesn't have an opinion about, you're stuck working around the framework. Good luck with that.

At the end of last summer we started to make the migration from Ember to React, and we removed the last Ember code from our code base in April of this year. It has been a slow process, but it has paid off immensely in productivity. I'd rather write code to solve all my problems than have a solution that solves 90% of my problems out of the box but then makes solving the remaining 10% a hacky, unpredictable process.

> I'd rather write code to solve all my problems than have a solution that solves 90% of my problems out of the box but then makes solving the remaining 10% a hacky, unpredictable process.

So are you saying that, absent a better framework than Ember, you would have recommended migrating to no framework at all?

No, when I say "I'd rather write code to solve all my problems" I'm talking about React. In React, things happen because you call a function, not because you named something the name that makes them get called, with only a handful of exceptions. You want to change the state, you call `setState`, you want to render the component you call `renderComponent`. It all looks surprisingly like writing code with a very helpful library.

I've done a lot of React but have since been burned out by it. It takes so much configuration just to set up something basic like server side rendering. After a year of hacking around with React and wallowing through the pain, I decided to just use Django and django templates. React is nice for a whole company that has one app with a tough initial setup but great performance in the long run, but its hard for individual hackers like me who just want to get tiny webapps up and running.

> It takes so much configuration just to set up something basic like server side rendering.

Is server side rendering basic or necessary in most "tiny" apps?

> Is server side rendering basic or necessary in most "tiny" apps?

Isn't it both?

I'm going to write some examples but I've started putting down my alternative setup without flux. I think it's a much simpler/nicer setup.

Would appreciate feedback:

https://github.com/lancecarlson/react-mvc

I've been exploring an alternative solution.

Currently playing around with the idea of a React app for building React apps.

Basically, it's an admin for specifying routes, models, components, database schemas, views, stores, reducers, etc. They are defined declaratively and serialized. Then can be feed to either a build step or a bootstrap that can load create the app dynamically.

Each type of thing that can be edited has its own dedicated UX.

Not much built yet but I'd be curious if anyone else has similar ideas / solutions.

read your comment right after I posted mine suggesting something like this wrapping the CLI.

There's a similar (in concept) idea in React Boilerplate

http://www.reactboilerplate.com/

There's several projects like this. Its an opinionated React startup kit utilizing Redux, React Router and Redux-Sagas. With generators, a server etc.

Because React doesn't provide the whole framework there's a bunch of these to get you started so the space is more complex to navigate then something like Ember.

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