I'm a huge fan of react. I've only worked with it for a little over a year now in my spare time, and only on 3 projects.
First encounters
The first time I heard about React was when I had gotten a gig from a client on Upwork. I had been asked to translate an existing app on Github from Norwegian to Spanish (which was a strange thing to do since I can't speak either) and to change where the app's data was from. I still have the fork I made on My Github Account if you're interested in poking around.
The falling in love
The second time was for a small app my wife wanted to use for Her Youtube Channel. She wanted to be able to generate a crossword puzzle that she could link to and that people could fill in and have checked online. This was when I really started to understand how react works (at least I think I do) and I thoroughly enjoyed myself while building this little project. I feel proud of what I made. You can find the app here, and the code is here.
Is this ever gonna end?
The last was a website that an acquaintance of mine wanted and promised to pay me for (we'll see if that ever happens). I won't go into specifics here for IP reasons (you'll just have to live with my vague descriptions for this one). The site was supposed to collect data from an FTP server (that data will come from a measuring device... somewhere), and then display it to a user. When first discussing the requirements, it seemed pretty simple... I thought I'd be able to go completely serverless even... I estimated it wouldn't take more than a couple of weeks and about 15 hours of my spare time (and that little big idiot inside me quoted that as an estimated cost, I mentioned this project briefly in my introduction post). Turns out you can't connect to an FTP server through a regular website, the browser can, but you as a developer can't download and upload that easily. On top of that, part of the spec was that all files will be overridden and I should make sure the site collects and stores every hour...
Anyway... loved react... hate PHP...
Working with react has been so much fun that for a while I thought that I wouldn't want to use anything else again...
But for my latest small project I decided to go with probably it's main competitor, Angular.
Dum dum duummm...
Stick around for why in the next post.
I've been developing a React app myself, and like it a lot. Quite a bit more magic going on there than in plain old Java though.
As far as magic goes, Angular has a lot more of it than React. The only real magical part of React is JSX and the speed at which it get's the diff between the virtual- and actual DOM. I explain a little bit about it in my next post
React is really great once one get the hang of it. My biggest complain though is that many of the modules available are not documented very well, causing me the spend too much time trying to brute force how to use them properly.
But on the other hand, these are modules people have provided for free, so who am I to complain.
I know what you mean. That's sort of what you get when choosing React (which is only a view rendering library) vs choosing a framework like Angular which comes pre-built with most of what you need. Again, in my next post I explain a bit about it
I just read the post you linked to. It's a really informative post, I finally learned the (main) difference between React and Angular. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
So, why are you switching?
I've been developing in Angular for the past 3 years now, it definitely has some great parts but it also has some downsides. I'm actually quite curious to learn React, but so far I haven't found the time yet. I'm interested to hear how you experience Angular after using React a lot.
You'll just have to wait and see why... 😉
And definitely take the time to learn. It really isn't that difficult once you get the hang of it. In fact I think it's much much easier to get the hang of than Angular (Opinion Alert!! Opinion Alert!!).
If you're interested, here is the tutorial series I followed to get started...
Awesome beginner friendly react tutorial by LearnCode.academy
Has about 23 videos covering pretty much everything you need to develop any frontend app you want.
yeah im curious to learn more React also, but totally in the Angular camp at the moment. Trying to generate some React CRUD apps soon. http://github.com/NinjaCodeGen