[gitaarik]

So for people who think they need Redux, first read "You Might Not Need Redux" [0] by Dan Abramov himself, creator of Redux.

Then also I would recommend MobX [1] over Redux, it's easier to get started and in my opinion easier and better in general.

[0] https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need-redux-be4...

[1] https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx

[paol]

I'm 3 months into my first React/Redux project and wouldn't adopt Redux again if I were starting over. Don't get me wrong, it's not horrible, but it's not great either.

Compared with the extreme elegance and simplicity of React itself, Redux is verbose, boilerplatery and the way it integrates with React never feels natural.

I've taken a look at Mobx and had that aha moment of "yes, this is what the solution should look like!" Of course there's a big caveat here: not having really used it I don't know what its problems are yet. I'm comparing the real world warts of Redux with the platonic ideal of Mobx, but still it's definitely what I would try if I were starting a React project now.

[ng12]

> the way it integrates with React never feels natural

Could you elaborate on that? In my opinion Redux reinforces that the majority of your app should effectively be (props) => JSX (even if they're es6 classes, they're still just rendering props). Alternatively I feel like it'd be relatively easy to do non-Reactish things with MobX since more of your components are aware of it.

[paol]

> Redux reinforces that the majority of your app should effectively be (props) => JSX

Sure, Redux strongly recommends that practise - and it's a good one - but nothing about it is specific to redux. You can factor your components in the same way with mobx, or with plain React for that matter.

The point of redux and alternatives is to remove state management from inside the components to a dedicated store. Redux doesn't feel natural to me because it does it in a round-about way, introducing more concepts than necessary for the job at hand. Then the responsibility for managing the store is scattered around the reducers, the actions and for anything not completely trivial, some middleware magic for good measure. The glue code between Redux and the components is slightly awkward as well.

Mobx just goes: a store is just a class with properties and methods. Done. Glue code? Wrap the component with a one-line decorator. Done.

[ng12]

In my mind there's very high value in the fact that deviating from that is _difficult_ with Redux. Not only does it keep me honest but if a junior dev jumps into my codebase it's actually work for him to do something sketchy with how he's controlling state.

[sixo]

Not the parent, but when I was trying to learn R+R I kept getting confused by what they meant by 'state'. React state belongs to some component (whichever can mutate it) and is passed to children via props, and generally seems to include a mixture of view state and data/model state, with view-state originating somewhere in the component hierarchy while model state comes from the root. Redux's tutorial implied to me that it expected all mutable state to originate from the root, which clashed with what I had come to expect from React. Since I am fairly new to front-end JS, I just found myself confused at which way was really wiser.

[trex654]

This comes up fairly frequently. The honest answer is that it's up to you and the requirements of your app where state gets stored. Unfortunately, state is everywhere: server/database state, local storage/cookie state, redux store state, react state, DOM state, etc. And that's if you have a fairly standard setup. Sometimes you want info from redux store state also stored in local storage and pulled on page reload, sometimes you want to get state from the server before continuing, sometimes an external library insists on DOM state, etc.

Generally, the problem redux is trying to solve is sharing state between components and saving client state globally. If there is information in a component for which you don't want to do either of those things, like UI details such as if a menu is or isn't collapsed, better to have that in the component react state.

Though this can be murky also. Showing the error modal I put in the redux store because I want it to supersede all other modals and to work globally.

This has been my experience anyway, as usual YMMV.

[hemisphere]

React allows you to keep state in components, but that doesn't mean that you should. When you're using React + Redux, keeping ANY state in components is an antipattern. Keeping all state in the "root" (the redux store) allows you to observe the your app's complete state in one place, all previous states, and the exact sequence of events that triggered all past state transitions. This discipline enables features like time-travel debugging, where you can rewind or fast-forward through your app's states one event at a time.

[trex654]

Trouble with this is, if you have a lot of drop-down menus that is a tremendous amount of additional code, actions have to be added, or added with abstractions, this new thing has to be managed in the global store etc. the end result being that your app is just slower because all this info has to pass through the dispatcher :/. Also can't see how rewinding simple isolated UI effects could help in debugging.

I've noticed that when programmers are introduced to a new technique there is a tendency to apply it everywhere. I had this experience when first learning recursion, it was all I used for a while, until I realized that was silly and now only use it where appropriate. This is true for OOP, functional programming, strictly adhering to even esoteric details of REST, etc.

I've found programming to be a lot like cooking. I really liked garlic, so when I first started cooking I would routinely add a couple extra cloves, until I discovered there very much was the possibility of too much garlic. This is true for each ingredient, you try stuff out and as your experience as a chef grows, you start to be able to suss out the right amount of each ingredient added at the right time.

Programmers are essentially virtual craftsmen, you have a set of tools and you try to build something effective with the tools you have. If you adhere to a principle so fiercely, the pieces of the puzzle often don't quite fit. You end up with a circle or square where something more acorn shaped would be most appropriate.

Anyhoo, don't take my word for it: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" - Ralph Waldo Emerson or "Only a Sith deals in absolutes" - Obi-wan.

[sixo]

Two responses to my comment, opposite recommendations. I'm inclined to agree with you in general, but the contradicting opinions can't be good for newcomers.

[acemarke]

A number of people in the community seem to have latched on to this "you MUST put EVERYTHING into Redux" idea, but it's definitely _not_ anything that's pushed by the Redux team. trex654 is correct here - it's entirely up to you to decide what state should live where.

The Redux FAQ addresses this at http://redux.js.org/docs/faq/OrganizingState.html#organizing... . Note that a number of the linked comments regarding whether or not to use Redux come straight from Dan Abramov himself.

Also, I have a number of articles on React state management practices as part of my React/Redux links list, at https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links/blob/master... , which may help clarify some of the ideas as well.

[mstijak]

You might also be interested in how Cx handles state and data-binding. It's a combination of ideas from Redux and Angular (immutable data store + declarative data binding) -https://cx.codaxy.com/docs/concepts/data-binding

Disclaimer: Cx is a commercial framework and I'm the author.

[smegel]

So if Redux sux now...how bad was Reflux and Flux?

[YPCrumble]

Completely agree about Redux - it has a large scope of functionality that also includes a long learning curve. I started using FreezerJS [0] a while back and have loved its simplicity. To my knowledge is the simplest alternative for state management, which you can understand in the ~100 line "Example" they provide.

[0] https://github.com/arqex/freezer

[ng12]

Correct me if I'm misunderstanding, but one thing that worries me about MobX is that it seems leakier than Redux. Something that I really, really care about is that a well-architected React application should hardly care what the data layer is. The bulk of the application is comprised of dumb/presenter components and only the handful of container components know anything about Redux.

Things like this (from the docs) make me nervous:

  const TodoView = observer(({todo}) =>
    <li>
        <input
            type="checkbox"
            checked={todo.finished}
            onClick={() => todo.finished = !todo.finished}
        />{todo.title}
    </li>
  )

TodoView is a dumb component that operates simple data passed via props, but now it needs to know that it's an observer and presumably rely on some facet of MobX to work?

[cheapsteak]

You can easily maintain the abstraction of dumb components if you wish to:

    const TodoView = ({title, isFinished, onClick}) => (
        <li>
            <input
                type="checkbox"
                checked={isFinished}
                onClick={onClick}
            />{title}
        </li>
      )

    const TodoViewContainer = observer({todo} => (
        <TodoView
          title={todo.title}
          isFinished={todo.finished}
          onClick={() => todo.finished = !todo.finished}
        />
      ))

But how often are you changing your app's data layer? Is the tradeoff _always_ worth it?

Mobx allows you to be as pragmatic or dogmatic as you choose to be

[ng12]

> But how often are you changing your app's data layer? Is the tradeoff _always_ worth it?

Yes, because in my mind that's the litmus test that your app is properly data-agnostic. And a key thing about Redux is it stays that way -- it's actually difficult to leak your data store to child components. Even if I adopt the above approach with MobX it'd be incredibly easy for some other developer to start passing around stores everywhere.

My gut feeling is that MobX would be great for a personal project but doesn't scale that well.

[gitaarik]

I've had a presentation about this a short while ago. It's easy to do both ways with MobX. You can have smart components and dump components however you want them. You have this with Redux too, but the most standard way in Redux is to use connect() and that makes components dump anyway.

[msoad]

I used both Redux and MobX. I can't recommend MobX enough. Redux is just way too much boilerplate code and has a steep learning curve.

Also MobX + TypeScript is just beyond awesome! You don't want to do MobX without TypeScript if you have the chance.

[flaviojuvenal]

It's been less than 6 months I first heard about Redux. Looking at its issues, it seems to be a little more than 1 year old. Now everyone is talking about MobX. Why not improving Redux in first place? If it's verbose, why not writing more abstractions on top of it to make it easier to use? IMHO we should think more about those questions before writing another framework-of-the-day.

[jorde]

Mobx has been around for a while but it's just less well known due to developer relations. In my experience, Redux is great but requires a lot of work to get started, or abstractions. People have made quite a lot of open source projects to solve these issues for different use cases but it looks like Dan and other developers want to keep Redux core very simple so I would not expect any opinionated abstractions to land in the core.

Mobx on the otherhand is "batteries included" and doesn't require much extra code to get started. We're using Mobx in production and only packages we needed to install were `mobx` and `mobx-react` along with some babel extensions. Very simple and increases developer efficiency by a mile not to mention onboarding time...

[acemarke]

There's definitely a lot of abstractions being written on top of Redux. Some of them stay with Redux's conventions, others try to take it in a very different philosophical direction. My Redux addons catalog lists just about everything out there: https://github.com/markerikson/redux-ecosystem-links .

[gitaarik]

The strategy of MobX is different. It's not easily possible to make Redux work like how MobX does it.