Wow the comments in here are awful. How about some constructive discussions folks? If you're not impressed by React or don't think it's useful, what, if anything, can we say or show you to convince you otherwise? I'm assuming that's what you're here - for knowledge - otherwise, why are you here?
I'm glad there have been no major announcements. This isn't an Apple keynote. We should want our tools to be predictable, stable, and paid attention to. Introducing more React stuff would be cool, don't get me wrong. But some of us are actually trying to build products and having stability and feature depth is more important than throwing React at another problem. The React team is fairly small and so they should stick to solving specific problems. There's still lots to be done in React Native.
Looking forward to seeing what the second half of the day brings. A lot of this stuff isn't particularly new to me but that's ok too. It's good to see they're still doing talks which introduce new users.
There's little constructive purpose for these bad faith remarks in threads like that in general (I've probably been guilty of some in the past myself). No need to slam one thing to raise up another - let tools stand on their own merit, and criticize based on that alone.
FWIW, I'm pretty heavily involved in the Angular community, and I respect what Facebook has done in creating & fostering React - I keep an eye on it because I love just about all things frontend on the web, even if I don't use React much (although I might use React Native for an app for a community I am a part of).
Sorry if I missed it, are there links to any kind of further reading or discussion regarding what Ben Alpert (spicyj) mentioned about implementing layouts in React? I do a lot of render -> dom-measure -> re-render and it's not the greatest. Would love to dive deeper into what the React team has in mind.
A big difference is that Facebook is using React in their own products. I don't think they will be as happy to dump the whole thing as soon as there is a slight change in winds, like Adobe did with Flex.
Flex, although still alive thanks to the efforts of a group of unsung heroes, is not a platform on which I would build anything new.
To be fair, so did Adobe in a lot of theirs. They did bet hard on Flash as a platform; it just wasn't a very good bet, and very little of it went into improving the actual runtime. Instead, they tried putting sugar on top (e.g. Flex) which obviously just added to the bloat. That said, some of that sugar had some interesting ideas going for them, lacking execution notwithstanding.
Obviously I agree with you, I would never build anything new with Flex, or target the Flash runtime; but that's not to say there aren't good lessons to be learned and concepts to be snatched. Hence, the "not sure if good or bad" comment – it depends on what you steal I guess.
Code reuse - I have an dual iOS/Android React Native app and over 90% of the codebase are generic components. Most of the difference are simply stylesheets, for platform-specific UX.
Besides that, there's the incalculable benefit of being able to use the same mental model (to say nothing of programming language) when developing, especially when designing UI components and animations. Even if you had equal skill with building layouts in both systems, there's great advantage in not having to context switch.
It's beyond amazing imo. Tricky in some areas but I just launched a pretty complex app in 4 months with 100% attention given to both android + ios, and it was just 1.5 developers (averaged over time).
The ability to reuse code is very real, even sharing a lot with a web react app since most state/business logic is in some flux implementation.
The pain points (documentation, build process, etc.) are real, too, but things I can forgive for now due to its newness and its very strong foundation.
The last time I checked it out, there was no easy way (via some existing component) to do a native dropdown in Android so I gave up. Is there a lot more support for Android these days?
First thing I see, Content editable, the good parts.
I'm expecting a Spreadsheets, the good parts coming next year or two base on the way people keep talking about state.
Well, you definitely don't have to use React for the rest of your app if you don't want to – you can use a Draft component inside any web app.
You could also use the underlying Draft model and manage the view entirely yourself, but React helps a lot here and removes a lot of complexity from Draft.
So your answer is to require pulling in an entire view library just to make a simple rich text editor work?
Also, I'm disheartened by the simple, anonymous down votes my comments are receiving rather than actual rebuttals. At least you had the decency to respond.
You are being downvoted for fairly obvious reasons, so I think most people don't see the need to tell you why:
First, you added a snarky, negative comment as the first response to someone open-sourcing a new library. There's no need for this, especially when spicyj is (as far as I've seen) an extremely gracious open-sourcer. Your comment's core complaint, about library lock-in, was actually a valid complaint, and something that should be discussed. But sadly, the way you brought up the idea means that no one else will want to engage.
Then, you replied to @spicyj's helpful response, which had I been him I probably wouldn't have even bothered with, with another snarky negative comment.
Finally, someone else jumped into the conversation with another solution, and you replied to their comment with a sarcastic non-question. Not only that, but you used a strawman of "to make a simple rich text editor work", when clearly that's not all Draft.js is trying to do.
And then after all of that, you complained about being anonymously downvoted. (And even in lodging that complaint you somehow managed to further subtly insult @tlrobinson.)
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I actually think your original issue, about library lock-in for text editor's a valid point. I see a lot of work going into separate rich text editors that are all reinventing the same sorts of things, with no clear best solution being developed for real-time use cases like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper. I really wish the perfect, easy solution for those existed.
That said, I'm excited about Draft.js because I think anything that Facebook wants to throw their open-source weight behind will get more love, even if it encourages others to make more competing editor libraries.
That said you’re absolutely not “required” to use it. It will be handy to React users because it fits into its component model and thus doesn’t have to implement the reconciliation from scratch. If you don’t use React you might not find it as handy. In this case you might like to use [ProseMirror](https://prosemirror.net/) instead.
Sorry, by simple I meant from the user's perspective. I don't mean to downplay the complexity of the actual implementation; it's a very hard problem to solve which is why I'm lamenting the React dependency.
Would you also complain if Google came out with a rich text editor for Android written in Java? React is more than a library, it's an ecosystem. If you don't want to use the ecosystem use something else. Seriously there are like 50 gazillion other editors out there for you.
Your post to HN is not well thought out. Most of us on HN come to read insightful comments with cinstructive critisicm. I came here to see if anyone is discussing it's architecture, performance, potential extensibility, comparison with other editors like CodeMirror and Quill etc. Your comment, in all honesty, sucked.
You added absolutely nothing to the conversation. If that particular editor doesn't meet your needs, there are many, many others out there. Just use one of them, and quit complaining.
For an "let's fix content-editable once and for all" affair, I don't think the initial widget they present on that page could be any more underwhelming.
I gather from the slip-up near the end of the Microsoft talk that React Native for Windows isn't here yet, but it's coming. But I'm guessing that will only be for Universal Windows Platform (i.e. mobile and tablet-style) apps, not Win32 desktop applications.
No, it's not. Not when what you're saying is doing absolutely nothing for the conversation, and really is just shitting on the work of others to make yourself look cool.
I don't see Polymer going anywhere either. The hype about web components have been drowned by React, which is here, now, and also solves several other issues that web components don't solve (especially along with something fluxy).
I'm glad there have been no major announcements. This isn't an Apple keynote. We should want our tools to be predictable, stable, and paid attention to. Introducing more React stuff would be cool, don't get me wrong. But some of us are actually trying to build products and having stability and feature depth is more important than throwing React at another problem. The React team is fairly small and so they should stick to solving specific problems. There's still lots to be done in React Native.
Looking forward to seeing what the second half of the day brings. A lot of this stuff isn't particularly new to me but that's ok too. It's good to see they're still doing talks which introduce new users.