Really can't decide to go ahead with an Angular approach (2.0) or use React. I know React is only for the view layer so what are people using with React to do stuff like api calls?
/components: These are all the JSX React components (the presentation layer) - so there are subfolders like "pages", "controls", etc.
/reducers: These are Redux reducers - they're the logic that handles all of the application state
/services: This is what your question was really about. We use basic ES6 modules for services, with methods like "fetchUser(id)" which use the new JS Fetch API behind the scenes. We then have redux-thunk and redux-promise middleware so we can easily offload state manipulation to these services without actually putting state logic in them.
I've set up a few React projects at this point and this always seems to keep a nice separation of logic. I'm never asking where data is coming from or where it's going. I think Redux has been the biggest difference maker when dealing with all of these parts.
It's no framework, but it's composed of well understood libraries, each with their own important function. You build the structure out yourself so you know exactly how it works, and the pattern will be very familiar to anyone who has used React before.
How does one create a reusable component (something I could publish on npm for example) for React + Redux? The component would have to define its own data expectations, so the actions and reducers would have to be defined by the component. How would you do this, given your folder structure (which I think is very common in Redux/React apps)?
Generally you don't actually use Redux in your component. Instead, you'd expose the action creators required by your component. Then the user has to make sure that the new state created from your actions gets back to your component via props. This is a common behaviour I've observed, anyway.
Yeah, this is an important question. I don't have answer for you and neither do the people in charge of the fetch API. It's an issue with promises not being cancelable. There's probably a reasonable argument that promises just aren't that great because you can only resolve or reject.
Personally I don't see a huge problem with either resolving or rejecting with a message about the cause of the result. Others see it differently but they haven't been able to make any progress on a major problem.
If you want to avoid this altogether there's no reason why you can't use a different library.
What about using observables? Unlike promises, they can be cancelled at any time.
Rxjs provides the observable data type. The extensions are functional reactive operators. There are operators used to retry, throttle, filter, debounce, etc.
Angular2's http module is already based on Rxjs observables for this exact reason.
I don't have an answer for you but I dislike that Fetch() doesn't currently have any support for progress events. So say good-bye to your file-upload progress bar!
I spent a month playing with the different libraries and settled on the following core modules for my frontend:
* redux: Keeps track of all the state (UI and domain) in a single object.
* immutable.js: Obviously for the immutable data structures which plays nicely within the React ecosystem. It also has a rich set of data structures that aren't found natively within JavaScript. For example I make heavy use of Records to simulate domain models.
* react-router: For routing within the application.
* superagent: For ajax calls.
* reselect: If using redux you'll cherry pick various parts of the state tree for your components. If any of the data used within components can be derived then reselect comes into play nicely.
It took longer than I had hoped but I finally have a strong set of libraries and project layout I'm happy and productive with.
Any good tutorials for CRUD-heavy redux apps? Do you dynamically create your action creators? Or did you write createWidget(), updateWidget(), retrieveWidget() and destroyWidget() manually per resource (and their 3 corresponding constants for REQUEST, SUCCESS and ERROR)?
And how do you ensure your detail components (WidgetDetail, or WidgetForm) have the widget loaded before displaying? asyncConnect?
I'm a visual person so perhaps seeing some code will help. I've gutted a CRUD heavy side project that shows how I lay things out and put it on Github [1]. I left out the back end folder so this repo isn't intended to work. The "users" and "journals" folders are the CRUD parts.
I prefer a domain folder structure versus splitting things by function. So instead of folders like "actions/userActions.js" and "reducers/userReducer.js" I'll do "users/actions.js" and "users/reducers.js".
I primarily use Django/Django Rest Framework as the back end so web-sockets are a pain right now. I'm looking forward to when Andrew Godwin's channel work gets into Django proper where socket.io would make a lot of sense. Unless I'm missing something and socket.io does ajax requests these days? I haven't used it in quite some time.
React seems to emphasize using regular javascript and existing NPM modules where possible. Superagent [1] seems to be a popular one, but you can find more on React's wiki [2].
If you start using a flux implementation like Redux, there are other interesting things you can do to handle api requests [3].
We're moving all our Angular code to React/Redux. Angular 2.0 seemed quite a bit more convoluted than React, even if it is saner than Angular 1.x.
Having simple and easy to create components is a major win. No one on my team ever liked or used directives much, as they were overly complicated.
Redux has been a huge win. In dev builds, every state change is output via a redux middleware, so it is easy to watch how state updates and transitions. In prod we plan on storing state updates and allowing them to be sent to support for trouble shooting. Even have plans for an overlay to allow support to step through those changes with a simple interface.
For me it comes down to what language are you more comfortable using. Plain old JavaScript with Babel ? React TypeScript ? Angular 2
Angular 2 is much more OO style GUI lib - if you've ever worked with stuff with WPF you'll recognize the patterns immediately - focus on DI, property bindings and attributes, class based design, etc. It really works well with TS and IDEs
React + TS is quirky to say the least - not just the base lib but the ecosystem - for example immutable.js is annoying to use with TS (creating typed records). It can be done but I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
But one huge consideration is that React has been "out there" for a while now - there's a ton of quality work available on top of it. In Angular 2 even the basics are in flux like animations and stuff like material design components are nowhere near in sight.
There's a touch more than views to consider, e.g. do you have to build or want a native mobile app? Angular 2.0 will be under heavy development whereas I think React has matured to the point where a lot of effort is going into ease of use and performance [1]. I also found the React tool chain (using webpack/babel5) very slightly more sane than grunt/gulp once my project grew beyond "Hello TODO". But the JS tooling is absolutely crazy no matter what platform is decided.
I'm using redux for API calls - I like the "single store" approach despite drawbacks vs. flux (or multiple stores).
I've only just started using React but I've been a Django developer for a few years. As I'm starting to use React, I'm still working with Django and Django-Rest-Framework for my backend. It's probably a little heavy weight but you could use something like Flask or whatever equivalent light weight Web framework is in your language of choice.
I think he's asking what to use on the front-end. The author of these tutorials (at least from what I've watched so far) uses axios: https://github.com/mzabriskie/axios
I'm a big Angular fan though I've done some React stuff as well. I think a reason to go with Angular 2 is the batteries-included approach (and TypeScript is cool once you get used to it, though certainly not required). With React you do end up having to hunt down libraries for everything beyond the view layer, which can mean a lot of random 3rd party libraries in various states of support. The flipside is the ecosystem is growing so could overcome those challenges and the architecture is simple and elegant. Honestly, I think ng2 is going to be really popular despite the backlash (and lack of HN representation) and so far the response I'm seeing is really positive once people dig in. I don't think you can go wrong with either though.
> which can mean a lot of random 3rd party libraries in various states of support
I think this aspect makes Angular feel more like the "Java EE" of the web world. You can throw an Angular developer at an existing Angular code base and I'm fairly certain he'll know exactly what goes where and how things are strung together without much digging around or documentation required. For enterprises this is a very good thing.
