This is how I start off a React app: $ npm install --save react react-dom
$ npm install --save-dev webpack webpack-dev-server babel-core babel-preset-es2015 babel-preset-react react-addons-test-utils
/webpack.config.js module.exports = {
entry: 'src/index.js',
output: 'dist/bundle.js',
module: {
loaders: [{
test: /\.jsx?$/,
exclude: /node_modules/,
loader: 'babel',
query: {
presets: ['es2015', 'react']
}
}]
}
}
/src/index.js import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
const MyRootComponent = (props) => {
return <div>Hello World</div>
};
ReactDOM.render(MyRootComponent, document.getElementById('react-app'));
/static/index.html ...
<body>
<div id="react-app"></div>
<script src="bundle.js"></script>
<body>
...
start the web server $ webpack-dev-server --content-base static/
There is nothing forcing you to use all the extra dependencies. You can build a full app without them. |
This right here is a major problem with a ton of apologists. "You don't need to use X and Y, just start with barebones Z".
If you're doing your own side project, sure. Or if you're lucky to be developer #1 in a greenfield project. I can count on one hand the number of times in my career that's happened.
Most of the time, you're going to be maintaining someone else's work. They'll have a ton of dependencies and glue and workarounds, and you're really, really lucky if they've written tests or documentation. So all the complexity mentioned in the article? You get to deal with that, only not so neatly put together. More likely they'll have an out-of-date version of react-router that's incompatible with the library you're trying to install, upgrading react-router means rewriting a ton of code because they love to change their API every other release....
Now I like React, and I've built things with it. But there is a huge and growing PR problem with it right now, that for all its promise there is too much incidental complexity, too many ways to do it, a lack of standardization around things like build tools. Companies aren't overjoyed at having codebases that become impossible to maintain 6 months out, when the frontend devs jump ship. Whether the answer is a more structured framework like Ember or Angular, I don't know, but there is a lot of fatigue and frustration around trying to build and maintain a project out of lots of tiny pieces, and it's showing in this thread.