Thank you for writing this article, Hatem. I've always wondered what an experienced Angular developer thinks of React, because ...well, I also switched between these technologies - not once, but twice actually. My first contact was with React. I tried to introduce it in a RoR project using Coffeescript instead of JS. I've read that React was a library only, so I was pretty sure it was possible to integrate it in the V of my RoR project. But using Coffeescript in JSX files (being CSX?) did not work out well. The result was so-so. I was glad to abandon this patchy tech stack recently.
Some years after this React encounter I suddenly had to learn a bit of Angular 2.x in one of my projects. Though I was overwhelmed by JS I somehow felt Angular being a nice and complete framework. The same feeling I had many years ago, when I learned RoR. So with Angular I somehow felt "home". Sure, the learning curve was steep, especially all the ES2015/2016/... stuff, but in Angular I could just follow the documentation in order to know where to go.
Then I switched again to a real React project (with a new backend). Suddenly I felt lost. Even though I knew why e.g. react-router and axios were not part of React, I could not appreciate this freedom. Instead I wished I had a complete framework that gives me the complete technology stack for the frontend.
Yes, a library gives you more freedom than a framework. But it's a 2-sided medal with incompleteness on the other side. It took me quite some time to appreciate React after my encounter with Angular.
JSX. I think it's a brilliant concept to build HTML in JS with syntactic sugar that looks like HTML. It's so powerful and yet so simple compared to building HTML in HTML with a special templating language on top or additional HTML tags that you must learn specifically for your framework.
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Thank you for writing this article, Hatem. I've always wondered what an experienced Angular developer thinks of React, because ...well, I also switched between these technologies - not once, but twice actually. My first contact was with React. I tried to introduce it in a RoR project using Coffeescript instead of JS. I've read that React was a library only, so I was pretty sure it was possible to integrate it in the V of my RoR project. But using Coffeescript in JSX files (being CSX?) did not work out well. The result was so-so. I was glad to abandon this patchy tech stack recently.
Some years after this React encounter I suddenly had to learn a bit of Angular 2.x in one of my projects. Though I was overwhelmed by JS I somehow felt Angular being a nice and complete framework. The same feeling I had many years ago, when I learned RoR. So with Angular I somehow felt "home". Sure, the learning curve was steep, especially all the ES2015/2016/... stuff, but in Angular I could just follow the documentation in order to know where to go.
Then I switched again to a real React project (with a new backend). Suddenly I felt lost. Even though I knew why e.g. react-router and axios were not part of React, I could not appreciate this freedom. Instead I wished I had a complete framework that gives me the complete technology stack for the frontend.
Yes, a library gives you more freedom than a framework. But it's a 2-sided medal with incompleteness on the other side. It took me quite some time to appreciate React after my encounter with Angular.
What made you finally appreciate the lib?
JSX. I think it's a brilliant concept to build HTML in JS with syntactic sugar that looks like HTML. It's so powerful and yet so simple compared to building HTML in HTML with a special templating language on top or additional HTML tags that you must learn specifically for your framework.