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by globisdead 3695 days ago
Might as well jump in here. I started with Angular 1 and am slowly migrating into React while having looked at and played around with a lot of Angular 2's beta releases. And when I say React I guess what I really mean is (React + ReactDOM + Babel/JSX + Webpack + ES6 + Redux) My point being there is a lot of tooling and setup and config you need to do before truly getting into building something great or efficient with it. It seems Angular 2 is going this route as well and they also throw in their special Angular ways of doing things. Their documentation is good but the product right now seems a bit rushed to compete with React and is sort of this weird middle-ground between the ease of use that Angular 1 was and the dependencies/component break-up mess with React. I went into React with a bunch of comments saying it's "simple" and just the view and everything we've heard of already. Well React is "simple" in the way that Arch Linux is the simplest Linux distro. And building the "just the view" part somehow takes two or three times longer than it should compared to building out the entire application using a full MVC or whatever pattern you want (Granted this probably has to do with the complete architectural design pattern shift more than anything else). With React you're encouraged to adopt a sort of top-most level state management with Redux when designing it but I suppose you don't have to do it that way. Maybe it's just the functional reactive programming side of it that makes it so difficult to grasp at first. I'm still sticking with it. I've spent a good chunk of time on it so far and need to adopt it for a large-scale application and with React it does seem like there's going to be a lot of work initially in the design + component breakdown/layout phase before getting into the actual building but I'm just hoping it pays off in the end. I'm keeping an eye on Angular 2 to see how it matures but it does feel a bit limited in scope in a similar way that Angular 1 did in that you have to do things the Angular way and just hope you run into someone who has the same problem or uploaded their sample code for you to look at and adopt into your project or use one of the many popular UIs and addons etc. React has a bunch of those too and it's probably more difficult to find a good component since there's just so many of them out there at this point, but the main takeaway from React is that it's pretty much pure Javascript and you sort of build from scratch there. It's getting pretty frustrating now trying to look up guides or tutorials for React since it's likely to be outdated if they're not using Webpack or ECMA2015 or even ReactDOM since they separated it in version 14 or something so all guides/tutorials prior to around November or December 2015 is pretty much outdated and you're not getting best practices or approaches there. There is no "Angular way" around here it's just a lot of Javascript everywhere. Sorry for the large block of text.
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