Comment by simonw
4 years ago
"A website has to go out of its way to mess this up."
I know it's supposed to be easier, but I keep seeing teams mess this up.
4 years ago
"A website has to go out of its way to mess this up."
I know it's supposed to be easier, but I keep seeing teams mess this up.
I can say I've seen a lot of state management issues with SPAs... more with Angular than React, and almost none when using React+Redux well.
I think a part of this is that a lot of developers simply don't desire, want to, get to or otherwise take the time to understand the framework they are using... It has been true forever... I can't tell you how many times I've seen stuff copy/pasted from StackOverflow, by devs that don't understand what they're doing, or they add jQuery to a React application, and have goofy interactions.
The lack of understanding will always be a thing, you have to learn, most learn by doing, and when starting out, you don't know that what you are doing isn't good, but it kind-of works.
React+redux well is a huge if.
Last time I used redux, about 4 years ago, every tutorial on it demonstrated a completely different way of using it.
I spent a week piping a couple dozen form inputs through redux.
Throw typescript in there and life got more complex.
Maybe it sucks less now. But I've seen plenty of websites where every key press causes crap tons of state to get copied around because "lol const only". I've seen sites where typing takes a second per character due to mis use of redux, and the problem with redux is that it is easier to misuse than to use properly.
The biggest issue I've seen with things like that, is certain actions with form validation can have unexpected surprises on keypress... so depending on how you're doing form validation, that is usually what will throw off the timing and things drop to a crawl.
Often, if you have a form action button, separate from your validation, best to update state as part of on-change or isolate form state until the action button itself is pressed to push to the redux state.
But I do understand the sentiment... I've run apps, and even forms with some relatively complex and large state via redux without much issue. The biggest hurdle is often getting everyone working on something to understand how redux works, and how the difference comparison works for state changes. Also, dealing with when/where an action should be created/dispatched, how to use the thunks for async handlers, etc.
Tried ngrx?
Yeah... it's decent, but there are many, many other reasons why I'll never touch an Angular app again.
I just don't know how it could be made any easier to not mess up. You really truly do need to go out of your way to mess it up, or be entirely unfamiliar with the JavaScript routing framework or library you're using.
They do, but it's usually the anti-SPA people who mess it up, by refusing to work with the grain of their tools. It's not quite the same thing as "strategic incompetence" but it feels related.