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Comment by cshenoy | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to defend anyone here but I think you're making the wrong comparison. React (the library) isn't changing. Just like Elixir, JavaScript (the language) is changing for the better and almost everything is backward compatible. What folks are upset with here is react-router, an optional, third party routing library dependent on React. Authors should be allowed to improve their own projects otherwise they become stagnant as the libraries and languages they depend on evolve. It's why semver exists.

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Much of React-Routers problems can be traced to the fact that it uses React components as its API. Yes, there's an alternative API in v3, but it doesn't seem to be very well thought through and is hardly ever used in examples.

Another issue with React-Router is that fundamentally in a web-based system, the router is the core of your framework (middleware, hand-offs to controllers/views, etc. are all built around the abstraction that the router sets up). With React-Router embracign React Components as their API, it means that your entire application must be built to the same abstraction---entirely within the React system, with components nesting other components.

I feel the problem of making a large javascript application client-side is best dealt with by keeping React as the view only, and putting everything else (router, dispatcher, models, etc.) in the form of another abstraction and not defaulting to component based architecture because that's simply what React does.

I agree. I don't necessarily want my routes to be declared in react. I'm currently looking into using router5 (https://github.com/router5/router5). The library also has integration plugins for react and redux.

Also, check out https://medium.com/@mweststrate/how-to-decouple-state-and-ui.... Michael Westrate talks about using your state container to control routing, instead of letting the components do it then syncing current route to state container. He is the author of mobx and uses it in his example, but I imagine it would work for redux scenarios too.

I've seen that article. :)

It came at a great time, in that it really crystallised some ideas I had been having about the friction of using React-Router. So I buckled down and wrote my own router component with HistoryJS & Crossroads.

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