[sdegutis]

I distinctly remember the phrase "V in MVC" being prominently displayed somewhere on the official React website(s).

Found it: https://web.archive.org/web/20140329114924/http://facebook.g...

> JUST THE UI

> Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

So I was mistaken. It didn't say that's what it's only intended for, but that's what many people use it for.

Either way, it's not great at the M or C parts of MVC. Context does very little to ease that pain. Redux was more manageable but also overly complex, but it's only React's design that forced it to be so complex.

[boubiyeah]

But managing state is quite hard in general. Angular proudly advertises it solves all problems you can have on the frontend but I would take react state + utils over angular's magic templates, rxjs and bindings any day.

[sdegutis]

Right, and that's what I'm recommending we in general try to innovate on: better state management than React, but with the ease of writing view components that React has showed works well. Since the view is hierarchical, it makes sense for components to inherently also be hierarchical, but business logic often doesn't match up to React's component hierarchy, so it should not be done inside React or tied to React's hierarchy.

[jf-]

Out of curiosity, have you actually tried the latest version of Angular to see if your preference does hold up? It’s come quite a way since the bad old days.

[tracker1]

I can't speak for GP, but have used angular up through 4.x (not quite current) and don't find it better than React's ecosystem imho.

With React I can often bring in additional components and libraries without friction. With Angular it feels like doing anything means significant friction. And heaven help you if you want to change the way something internal works, or work around things.

[jf-]

I can’t say I’ve had that much trouble bringing in third party libraries, nor have I had a need to change how the framework works internally. I think this is the same as with most frameworks, you tend to just use them rather than doing stuff under the hood. Can you give an example?

[tracker1]

At this point not really... it's been over a year since I've had to really worry about it. It was better using angular-redux or ngrx, but still was a weird experience. When you have eventing issues with RXJS, or handling integration with other libraries, it's definitely not as broad or mature as the React space is. Anything from chartjs to color pickers, I'm trying to recall the last big issue I had in an angular app. In the end, I just remember pain all along the way more than most specific examples.

Oh yeah... drag-drop integration... that was the single biggest pain. None of the component libraries worked well, and doing it manually was harder than I've experienced before, including just straight JS, and definitely worse as a whole than using say jQuery-UI.

If it were a year or more ago, I could cite better examples of pain points. 2+ is better than 1.x, but still horrible. I'd rather see people adopt Vue over Angular. I still prefer a react-alike over any of them.

[jf-]

Funny you should mention drag drop, it’s now built in as of version 7, just released a few days ago. Look up the CDK for more details.

Whenever I’ve needed drag and drop functionality in the past I’ve found it in existing UI components. A fairly comprehensive one is primeng. I’ve also added an angular colour picker and highcharts without very much trouble.

Often when I hear people complain about angular, I wonder if they just don’t understand it very well and are trying to do things the wrong way. Angular is opinionated, but I don’t find it terribly difficult or painful, though at this point I do have rather a lot of experience with it and find it’s difficult to put myself back in the shoes of someone with less.

I really do enjoy the framework and how comprehensive it is. I like having a framework that gives me so much out of the box without having to go to a somewhat unstable ecosystem of related projects. Frankly I think Angular’s bad name is due in part to it simply being fashionable to put Angular down, and partially because it’s critics never really learned how to use it.

Also, something about jsx just rubs me up the wrong way.