That, or you can continue to use redux, which has existed since 2015, is mature, and still by far the most widely used state management system for react.
For unknown reasons most front-end developers don't wanna hear that and love to start with mega complexity and boilerplate where just a simple flux store or a library like 'unstated' would suffice. Anything leaner than redux is very welcome for the average companies web app imao.
As per my own comments, I agree strongly.
> For unknown reasons most front-end developers don't wanna hear that and love to start with mega complexity and boilerplate where just a simple flux store or a library like 'unstated' would suffice.
Not unknown, no. Because FB promoted Flux like it was something magical and never seen before, talked about store without providing best practices or reference implementations, and so many store implementations came out at the same time. And most tutorials, not knowing exactly what to recommand to provide some state to your tiny app, started all to promote one store or another. So people though it was mandatory.
It's like with react tutorials.
When I teach react, I make sure people start by just dropping a script tag, and use createElement. No JSX. No webpack. Most of the page is even static HTML.
Only once they got the basics covered, I build on that up to abstractions, tooling, best practices, etc.
That's not what you read online. Online, people drop some magic lines and say "see how this todo list example is easy ?", then let you die here.
All in all, reactive programming is easier, because it doesn't require you to make all the plumping to get running water.
It tooks years to sort that out.
Yes except we spent years having so many projects crashing under the complexity of using a store, most juniors being unable to produce decent code and managing the numerous layers of indirection.
Yes except we learned later, hey, a store is not required for most projects. You totally should use react without a store for your little service. But we won't give you a best practice to do so.
Yes except for a single little incremental counter in redux, tutorials invite your to create a store, an action factory, and action dispatcher, an adapter to connect them, and then use a provider to pass the store. To escape this madness, you may use, yet another abstraction du jour, or just write hundreds of lines of boiler plate. Or do it another way, hoping it's alright, and creating yet another differently styled code base.
Yes except mobx or vue are way easier to use. Oh but they are yet another tool to learn and manage.
Rince and repeat, I said.
React is the first time I feel like we've actually hit something good. It's still not fully there, but it's the closest it has felt to that so far.
State management is messy, that's clearly an area where the problem still hasn't been solved. The main issue is that state means too much really. There's your (typically) main source of truth: the database. Then your server may maintain some state (although nowadays this is not common, thankfully). Then there's the frontend app state, which loads from the server/db, and may or may not staty up to date.
On top of this you have temporary frontend state (unsaved changes), and finally pure UI state (hovering things, "show more"... )
Managing all of this is extremely difficult. Graphql with the appropriate frontend library for example is revolutionary in some ways, but a major difference in backend architecture, which isn't easy to reason about (fine grained entitlements, mutations & side effects such as notification emails, report generation.. are not easy)
Anyway, my point is that I understand your frustration with how everything's outdated too quickly, and how in the past we had stable frameworks or languages. But I feel the reason is that we are actually in a transition period, and making a lot of progress really fast. Hopefully the outcome of these messy years is a Standard™ way to define a UI, it's state, and it's interactions with an API, in an e2e type-safe, testable manner. One can dream right?
Yep, maturing takes time - duh.
This problem doesn't exist in the PHP, Python or Ruby communities.
We get incremental improvements, sometimes a few innovative contenders show up, we evaluate it, then a winner appear, generally under a year.
With JS it's:
- a new wild pokemon appears !
- quick, everybody make 200 new pokeball models and throw them at it
- spend 3 years sorting said pokeballs, while the pokemon disapears
I mean, it's not like this is forced upon you. You're free to continue to use Backbone or Knockout or Ember if you want to. Angular 1.x has been replaced with Angular 2 (and I think the Angular team was rightly criticised by how they managed this transition), but most other popular frameworks are still around.
Of course, for new projects you may want to pick a newer framework if you believe it offers significant improvements over what came before. For me, React was clearly in this category. And yes, there are lot of people who chase the latest shiny thing, even if it is new and unproven. But that doesn't mean there aren't also stable, proven stacks.
In fact, the main reason is that there is no current other client side web language than Javascript.
We don't use JS because it's great. It's a badly designed languages, and half of the stack we use are hacks to make it usable. We use it because there is nothing else.