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by jasonjackson 3464 days ago
Om.next shows it's strength when you're working on a complex application 5k+ lines of code. A core abstractions of om.next (and graphQL) is to express data dependencies of your react classes in a query language (e.g. component X depends on data title, author, created, updated), then the logic around how to fetch data, refresh data, cache data or access cached data, update data, deduplicate data when it's needed in many places, optimistically update client-side data and wait for server-side data to synchronize is all disentangled from the logic on rendering complete data, missing data, data being loaded, reacting to user events, etc. In a smaller code base expressing these data dependencies would just seem tedious (writing graphQL or query expressions), but it pays up big time in larger applications.
1 comments
thom 3464 days ago
I absolutely agree that larger apps are complicated, and that Om has thoughtful solutions to those problems, at the right level of abstraction. But I found it an absolute _pain_ to get going, and at every step it presented me with so many different primitives I felt lost.

If I had to compare it to any other tool, it'd be git. I love git. I use git every day. Do I understand the underlying mental model of git, or the 348 different git commands? Hell no.

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jasonjackson 3464 days ago
Yes, I think those are all valid points/weaknesses. While I don't personal struggle with understanding the internals of git or om.next the learning curve is no joke. The community is aware of this, but it's still alpha software they're working on it. I actually think of om.next more like a library than a web framework. As a library it has many degrees of freedom in how it can be composed and i imagine the author prioritized flexibility/generality over concreteness, and a lot of work is still left up to the user in filling in the blanks of a full fledge web app, untangled (https://untangled-web.github.io/untangled/) is one project tries to fill in all the missing gaps and expose a framework API, much better documentation, more concrete than om.next.
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fnordsensei 3464 days ago
I'd have to agree. Reagent was able to expose the beauty of the concept to me more clearly than Om. When I approached Om, I found it to be on a completely different level with regards to things to understand and absorb.

Having said that, I'm also pretty sure that Om yields bigger payoffs further down the road as far as I can tell.

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