[garrincha]

Thanks a lot. This was already very helpful.

I'm still somewhat scarred from the time I invested a ton of time into Angular.

Not sure you would be able to answer this, but is React something that works well with Rails out of the box? For instance, I found that Angular (when I was learning it) required a fair bit of shoehorning to get it to work well with rails.

[ggregoire]

Angular and React are like black and white when we talk about time of learning.

Simply because :

- Angular is a full framework including html templating, directives, components, controllers, services, router, xhr abstractions ($http and $resource), dependency injection, two-way data binding by default, one-way data binding if you want (to fix performance issues) and the list can continue. Plus, you need to set and learn a style guide [1] and some good practices because, if you have 2 developers, none of them will code in Angular in the same way.

=> it took me weeks to learn, and months to master.

- React is just a library to build views. You code 90% of your time in basic JS and 10% in React APIs (basically: states, props, lifecycle methods and that's it).

=> it took me 1 hour to learn, and 1 week to master.

If you want to learn React, you just need to read the official tutorial [2].

---

[1] https://github.com/johnpapa/angular-styleguide

[2] https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/tutorial.html

[verletx64]

This is pretty misleading as a comparison, yes you can learn React itself very shortly, but the ecosystem around it will probably bring you much closer to Angular learning times, and that's also without the AngularJS documentation which is top notch.

I prefer React to AngularJS but I don't think it's fair to tell half the story when comparing them.

[bostonvaulter2]

But the downside to learning react is learning the react ecosystem, redux, other flux frameworks, etc.

[davedx]

I'm working on an app for work that's a Rails API backend with a React front end. This stack is a pleasure to work with, once you get past the initial bits of setup.

With React I use Redux for state and ES7 bits for async and await. Productivity is high.

[kwood]

I was in quite the same situation, Angular 1.x was quite hard to grok at first. But React just "clicked" instantly.

For integration with Rails, I found https://github.com/reactjs/react-rails to be quite useful. It integrates the Babel transformer for JSX into the asset pipeline and brings a couple of helper functions, so no additional setup needed.

You start writing your components, "mount" them via the helpers in standard .erb templates (or even without the template directly from a controller action), done.

[rukuu001]

React in its basic form is pretty simple, you'll grok it in a couple sessions of playing with it. And since it's 100% view, you can fit it over pretty much anything.

This is assuming you're prepared to do rendering in the browser. If you want to do server side rendering I think you'll be doing more shoehornig :)

[zodiac]

Personally I use my backend (rails, flask, etc) just to expose an API and react in the frontend, it's a pretty clean separation