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by thermodynthrway 2893 days ago
It's extremely easy to use React in small parts of the page and spread it out over time. It's a couple lines of code to init React in a div and fully supported. You can even communicate between React bits spread across the page.

React also let's you mark areas/divs within its domain as "don't touch this". So in those areas you can use things like that old map widget you love so much, without resorting to iframes

Angular is a huge fail in this regard. Zero support for mixing with "non angular" pages.
3 comments
EugeneOZ 2893 days ago
All what you describe in this commentary is much more easy to implement with just jQuery. Your logic more looks like "I can do it with React so it means I should and I believe it's the best tool".
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girvo 2892 days ago
Until you’ve got some moderately complex state and infrastructure to handle it, where you end up recreating the whole State -> Render loop of React in jQuery. I recently did this. It works, well, and with less bugs than most hacky jQuery DOM modification, but by the end I was pining for any other modern view library that already solved this. Same reason I used to pine for jQuery on some projects.
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feverdream 2893 days ago
Can you elaborate on this? In my limited experience with React, it takes over your whole application, or at least the whole page. How do you mark areas as "don't touch this"?
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kroltan 2893 days ago
I'm not sure on the "don't touch this" part, but in regards to "taking over the application", it certainly doesn't.

React's entry point is the `ReactDOM.render` function, which takes some React elements, and a root node. that root node can be _any_ DOM node (Actually no idea if you can mount React into a inline SVG, but at least any _HTML_ node you certainly can). You can also have multiple `ReactDOM.render` calls, no problem at all.

That initial React element can very well take values and callbacks from your Angular or whatever application.

It can get messy if you nest `ReactDOM.render` within roots that are managed by React, but so would nesting any other UI framework, but the use cases for that are... Exuberantly exotic, to say the least.

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mhink 2893 days ago
So, the way to look at it is that you “mount” a React application at a specific part of the DOM. Anything under that point is managed by React components.

Usually, people have a single “mount point” very close to the <body> element, and a single script file whose primary purpose is to call ReactDOM.render to “mount” a React component representing their application at that point.

However, that doesn’t prevent you from having DOM outside that mount point, and it doesn’t prevent you from having code which does other things that don’t have anything to do with the React-managed part of the page. This is a great way to migrate a legacy application to React: you choose one small section of your page to replace with React, and then have the remainder of your page interact with it by 1.) choosing when to call ReactDOM.render again to ask it to update, and 2.) passing in callbacks so the React ”mini-app” can notify the rest of your application when something happens.

You can go the other way, too, although it’s a little less safe. If you have a React component which renders, say, a <div> with no children, you can get a handle to the DOM element itself and interact with it just like you would in a non-React application. The only constraint here is that you have to make sure to clean up e.g. event handlers and release references to those elements if something causes the “owner” React component to unmount. This is how people make wrapper libraries which let you use non-React-based libraries using React components. (I’ve done this in a side project where I had a huge number homogenous DOM elements to work with, and found that managing them myself was much more performant than trying to run them through React’s model.)

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disiplus 2893 days ago
i have something like that in one of my projects, there is "inbox" in one of my apps, it is handled with react, and the header, and top menu are outside of react and generated from backend. it works great. the only problem i had is in the developing, the thing that i did is i developed the inbox feature separately and then im copying the dist to my app on compile.
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thermodynthrway 2893 days ago
I haven't had to do so much myself, but the docs have decent info on how to obtain it. https://reactjs.org/docs/integrating-with-other-libraries.ht...
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testvox 2893 days ago
React components mount to any element you want. And everything they do will happen within that element if you are using react conventionally. There is no issue mounting components alongside/inside legacy apps.
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FLUX-YOU 2893 days ago
Angular is a nightmare for complex UI interactions for components that are spread out.

I'm sure experienced people know how to do that properly, but it's really difficult starting out.

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thermodynthrway 2893 days ago
Angular's learning curve is the worst I've ever seen. We mostly use it because "Enterprise" but I prefer React when we get permission for that reason.

Too much abstraction, too much magic. It's possible to do just about anything but the docs are sparse enough that you'll be crawling through github PR's and source to figure out how to achieve it sometimes

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EugeneOZ 2893 days ago
Angular is an amazing tool for building reusable components and interoperation between them is pretty easy to implement (just use "input/output" handlers). I'm not saying it just to say something opposite, it is really my opinion and it's what I do almost every day.
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