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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

For me, the biggest problem with redux is that

- I don't already understand how an app using redux works when it reaches a decent size; therefore don't know what problems it will have and need to learn more

- I can't start using redux to understand those problems without making important architectural choices early on, i.e. between sagas/thunks, ducks/not-ducks, or how to remove duplication from reducers, because the community has so many parallel solutions to any given problem; therefore, I need to write a toy app instead of using it on a real product

- redux on its own seems to need about ten packages before you can load information from a json api and pass it to react, a task which is the basis for most toy apps; therefore, every toy app I write seems bloated and heavyweight

It's a hard ecosystem to bootstrap yourself into.

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What sort of issues are you running into as far as "how an app using Redux works"? For myself, the first thing I usually do when looking at an unfamiliar Redux codebase is to look at the store creation logic, see what middleware packages are being used, and see where the root reducer logic is being imported from. Then, I skim through the reducers to get an understanding of what the state structure is, what kinds of values are being stored, and what some of the reducer operations are.

I'm not sure why you say that "you need 10 packages to load JSON data". Assuming that you're in a browser that supports the Fetch API, you need _no_ additional packages at all. You can make an AJAX call in a connected component, and call `this.props.dispatch({type : "DATA_LOADED", payload : response.data})` in the success handler.

Now, we do encourage people to try moving that logic out of components to make it more reusable, which usually means using thunks. However, redux-thunk is all of 12-ish lines long, and if you'd prefer not to actually add it as a separate package, it can easily be pasted into your app directly. But, you genuinely shouldn't _need_ more packages than that to be making AJAX calls. There's plenty of additional abstractions that are available around making network requests and processing the results, but those are all purely optional.

Sorry, I was a bit ambiguous and whiny in that post. What I mean is that there's a paradox of choice when trying to work out what best practices for Redux are, after running through the docs but before building something. When there are five good solutions to a problem, and none are canonical, it takes five times as long to choose one.

Yeah, as with React, we've tried to leave the choices up to the community. This is great for some people who prefer to make choices, but not as good for others who want to be given a direction to follow.

Besides the other "discussion about abstraction" issue I just linked in another comment, I also recently opened up issues to discuss general docs improvements [0] and a rework of the "Ecosystem" page [1]. I really would like to have some docs sections that give more opinionated advice for topics such as "what side effects lib do I use?". Unfortunately, my own free time is already very limited, but I would _love_ to work with people from the community to add new docs sections and update the existing ones.

I also agree that there's a bit of a gap between the "TodoMVC" level and the "building a full-blown production app in the real world" level, in terms of docs and advice. I'd love to see some new docs sections that help with that aspect as well.

So, genuine request to you, and any other readers/Redux users out there: if you are interested in helping improve the Redux docs, PLEASE let me know! Ping me on Twitter or Reactiflux, file an issue, or leave a comment on an existing issue, and we can figure out how you can help us make the docs better and make it easier for people to level up along their Redux journey.

[0] https://github.com/reactjs/redux/issues/2590

[1] https://github.com/reactjs/redux/issues/2588

> I don't already understand how an app using redux works when it reaches a decent size; therefore don't know what problems it will have and need to learn more

This sounds like a problem of inexperience (which is a problem everyone faces when using a new tool). If you've never used Rails, you're not going to understand the long term implications of maintaining and scaling a complex Rails application. If you want to know what problems you will encounter, you'll have to read a book or learn the hard way, the same as any other tool.

> I can't start using redux to understand those problems without making important architectural choices early on,

This means you're not experienced enough with redux to be making those choices and that's ok; use an alternative tool that you understand well, hire someone with the relevant experience, read a book, or understand that you'll have to do some refactoring later on if you make the wrong choices today.

> redux on its own seems to need about ten packages before you can load information from a json api and pass it to react, a task which is the basis for most toy apps; therefore, every toy app I write seems bloated and heavyweight

This is not correct, but also "not even wrong" in the sense that this concern is outside the scope of redux. If you want to use a bunch of redux related data packages that's fine, you're also free to use GraphQL, Backbone, fetch, jquery, webosckets or straight up XMLHttpRequest. When I hear "I need 100 packages just to do X" it's usually a sign to me that the developer is somewhat inexperienced with the ecosystem and tends to defer to a package whenever they need to solve a problem; this is usually the wrong approach, it's like someone complaining "I need 10 packages just to do string padding"... well no, you don't, just write that code yourself.

> It's a hard ecosystem to bootstrap yourself into.

So is cross-platform game programming and there are hundreds of different engines, toolkits, SDKs, editors and other utilities spread across a dozen different languages. Which one should you choose? I don't know it's all too confusing, they should just stop making new tools so I can catch up.

> This means you're not experienced enough with redux to be making those choices

This is the fundamental problem. In order to learn Redux, you need experience with it. In order to get experience, you need to work with Redux. In order to work with Redux, you need to learn it.

You use the example of Rails, but Rails is the poster child of opinionated frameworks. For someone trying to learn it, there's no ambiguity about how a project is structured. The same is true of Unity or the UDK: there's a single tech choice to make, after which you can rely on the framework to guide you.

I understand that the js community prefers small composable libraries, and agree with the reasoning, but with Redux this is taken to extremes: a tiny core library, documentation that's mostly boilerplate, and much greater cognitive overhead than any other state management.

I opened up an issue earlier this year to discuss possible ways to improve the experience for new Redux users, and additional useful abstractions that could be built on top of Redux: https://github.com/reactjs/redux/issues/2295 . If you've got feedback or comments, I'd encourage you to contribute them to that discussion.

Also, as unofficial keeper of the Redux docs, I'd also appreciate any suggestions for improving them. Can you clarify what you mean by "documentation that's mostly boilerplate?

If you're looking for more of an "integrated" Redux experience, you might want to look at https://kea.js.org/ .

I'm actually already using Kea. Thanks for the suggestion, it's an awesome project!

By boilerplate I mean that the docs are written using examples of e.g. a single network request and a handful of actions, where even a small application with a few repeated bits of code would introduce abstractions for common elements. Because the docs lay out the simplest possible way to do this, they don't fully represent a real app, and because the ecosystem is so vast, it's not obvious which abstractions are state-of-the-art.

Filling in the "next steps" tab with some hints about where to go would probably help a lot.

Huh. Indeed, that "Next Steps" page never has been created. That's an excellent suggestion, thank you. I just opened up https://github.com/reactjs/redux/issues/2626 to cover adding that docs page.

If you or anyone else reading would like to contribute writing that page, please leave a comment and let me know!

And yes, it's always tough to balance the various audiences and use cases when writing docs. Minimal examples like a TodoMVC can be helpful for showing off basic concepts and keeping a learner from getting too lost, but then those don't cover the complexities of a real-world app.

Actually have a request for you, now that I think of it. Like most of the addons I've catalogued, I haven't had a chance to play with Kea myself. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how useful it is, how it compares to using "plain" Redux, and so on. Please leave a comment here, or catch me on Reactiflux.

Hey, author of Kea here. I'm always very interested in feedback as well! :)

So strken, acemarke and others: Feel free to reply here, contact me on reactiflux (@mariusandra) or shoot me an e-mail if you feel like talking about Kea.

Cheers and thanks for all the nice words so far. :)

I might do a write-up of implementing the same app in Kea and vanilla Redux, and if I do I'll get in touch with you on Reactiflux. Thanks for engaging in such a positive way with the community!

Cool, look forward to it, and definitely ping me when you've got it ready.

And you're welcome! I probably spend a bit too much more time answering questions than I really should, but hopefully it's helpful :)

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