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subbz

From the point of view of a guy who skipped the React, Angular, Vue hypes until today:

- Where are we going to?

- What is the sense behind this syntax?

- Can we go back to HTML/CSS/JS when the hype's over?

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>>a guy who's skipped the React, Angular, Vue hypes

This is the root of your consternation. Like everything in our industry - experiment, build, then judge. I was a naysayer initially too. Then I tried React, Redux, styled-components, etc. and now I'm a believer. Combine this with modern CSS like Flexbox and CSS Grid and it truly is a golden age of web development!

The single big thing that makes me go back and forth about whether I (deep down) like these systems is the surrender of control.

On the one hand: It is powerful at automating some the typical tedium you always have. It gives you a better chance to end up with a decent view model, by forcing it upon you.

On the other hand: You lose control. Almost always you can gain it back, but it is an uphill battle. If you know you need low level control (for example over complex animations and interactions in your UI) you've got to think carefully.

It all comes back to perspective. As an interaction engineer I really hate the process of trying to make a specific animation work the way I want inside of a React managed DOM. As an application developer, the purity of the approach is extremely attractive.

Also I must brush up on Grid. It's about time we got rid of god damn tables.

I agree, that's why I like styled components so much. It's all based on vanilla CSS - there's no new syntax. I use animations, pseudo-classes, etc all with styled-components. Animations with react are cumbersome. So I try as much as possible to fall back to CSS animations - they yield better perf anyway. With styled components this becomes easier since you can have CSS values derived from React props.

We're already back friend. Just pickup React and you're good to go. The high level overview is super simple (use state to deterministically generate markup), it's easy to use once you spend an hour with JSX, its got huge mindshare so it's not going anywhere anytime soon, and most importantly it's a huge improvement over all the jQuery acrobatics you'd need to do similar interactive components.

The current trend with react reminds me of jQuery 10 years ago. It just fits like a glove. The thing you didn't know you were missing until you found it. Vue is very similar. You will start seeing react be the default option for new projects all over the industry. Yes, you should learn it now.

When jQuery was young it was not alone.

What are the current Dojo? Or the current Mootools, prototype?

Backbone, ember, angular, web components. They're all ok and perfectly usable but they're losing to react by a wide margin.

Isn't Backbone the closest analogy to React, in that it tries to be modular enough to be as small/big as needed -- as opposed to a full MVC-ish framework like Angular and Ember?

Backbone is an elegant library but I think its popularity and ecosystem were on a decline even before Walmart -- which was one of the biggest corporate contributors (e.g. Thorax [0]) -- did a complete overhaul in 2016 to React [1]

[0] https://github.com/walmartlabs/thorax

[1] https://medium.com/walmartlabs/publish-react-native-bundles-...

No, Backbone is a collection of things and closer to a framework rather than a library, like React.

Backbone has Models, Collections, a Router, History, Sync, View and Utilities.

In contrast, React is only the view part.

So, it would be closer to say that React is just the View part of Backbone, you need to bring in the rest yourself.

Vue and Angular 1 are in the same family. For the React family, there's Mithril.js.

It's an useful standard for a JS only web app.

Once you work a bit with React/Angular/Aurelia, you start noticing that having your styles somewhere in a stylesheet is somewhat clumsy for reusable components or overly dynamic components.

You end up having to refactor with your stylesheets very often as your app grows and things can quickly turn into a mess.

You are then tempted to put style="" declaration in your .jshtml (or equivalent) templates but that's a also mess. So your start developing a way to inject styles into dom elements. This then grow up into some strange frankeinstein that no other devs can work with because you documented nothing... so you simply start using https://www.styled-components.com instead.

That is what WebComponents are for.

>- What is the sense behind this syntax?

>- Can we go back to HTML/CSS/JS when the hype's over?

Frameworks like React and Vue make building large, complicated front-ends a lot easier and predictable.

I use React for most projects I work on. I also use HTML, CSS and VanillaJS for quite a lot of projects too. I find knowing both gives you great flexibility and fits the code to appropriate applications well.

The alternatives are shoehorning React into simple content-centric pages (bloat), or stitching together a bespoke set of logic for a large complex app noone will be able to maintain (spaghetti).

What sense? To spend more billable hours at (freelance) work. :)

Sure, I have been ignoring the hype so far.

I am quite happy with VanilaJS™, but I do sometimes use jQuery as well.

We are going back to 15 years ago when we had element behaviors in Internet Explorer that let you package up the HTML, JS and CSS into one file - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531426(v=vs.85).a...

I think we learn that there is value even in bad implementation. For example, a lot of what custom tags promised in ColdFusion 20 years are finding fruition in client-side components.

Likewise, I think there's value in scoped work, as opposed to the mess than can come of globals. Otherwise you find yourself hard-coding !important when you need to make something work.

I prefer "build on lessons learned from" to "going back to" :-)

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