RIP Redux: Dan Abramovich Announces Future-Fetcher | Hacker News Reader

RIP Redux: Dan Abramovich Announces Future-Fetcher

react-etc.net

35 pointsvelmu45 comments

Future fetcher is not a replacement for Redux. It's a feature they will be adding to React later on in 2018 to allow devs to adaptively render elements based on network performance. You can signal to React to delay rendering specific components until an async operation is complete.

Redux is a state management layer. Future fetching does nothing to solve app-level state management.

Gross misrepresentation of Dan's talk by this article and he made zero mention of the React context API in the talk.

https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/the-future-of-state-manageme...

What about apollo-link-state? Not a replacement either per se, but seems like its one step closer to isomorphic (client & server side) state.

On one hand it normalizes your data & avoids thousands of lines of boilerplate, on the other hand you lose [some] control of the underlying data structures which is where you'd still need something like redux.

I love Apollo. I think it's great! It really does reduce like 2/3 of the state you need to manage in your app. Only caveat is that it's somewhat arduous to use unless you have a GraphQL backend, so you really do have to buy in to that whole stack. That's sometimes a luxury not all products/teams are blessed with.

> The concepts are clear to those with a Computer Science (CS) educational background, but since the large mass web developers come mostly outside of this arena it is a hindrance.

Seriously?

A CS degree is not necessary in order to understand functional programming, and it's not like reducer functions are all that complicated.

The vast majority of developers absolutely cannot handle reducers. Give them a pattern to follow and they'll follow, though.

I think the difficulty is in making sure the state is not mutated. This is unusual for most developers, especially those coming from an OOP background.

It seems like you have some stats I don't have access to. Care to share? I feel it implausible that given reduce is a functionality built into JavaScript, very useful, and that it's the worlds most common programming language saying the vast majority seems like a stretch.

The async rendering rendering stuff Dan is showing in his talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c7ajDXb4qw) looks great, but I disagree that this is a redux killer.

redux is useful for a lot more than just async fetching & loading. I think these new features will just reduce the scope of what redux is used heavily for.

> redux is useful for a lot more than just async fetching & loading

Redux deliberately doesn't deal with async processes, that's left up to the user.

The video has been blocked. Anyone know of a mirror?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6iR3Zk4oDY

Thank you!

This might be one of the most poorly written articles I've ever seen on HN.

I use redux a lot and love the way you can reason about the state of the app from a single object - which opens up all sorts of useful things like time-travel etc.

However - after having plugged in a lot of reducers - the boilerplate code required to do simple stuff becomes a real bore. I've since compromised by using a simple `key-value store` reducer that I can write new values to without needing a new reducer with accompanying actions.

I'm sure this is not how it's supposed to be used but nobody ain't got no time for making all that boilerplate just for a button :-)

Like I say - it's worth it though - it's amazing how large frontend apps "just work" once you have the state in a single place and the UI rendering from it and it alone.

I created a class compatible with Redux time travel and debugging tools that works like this (in typescript):

    interface FooState {
      myNumber: number;
      myArray: number[]
    }

    class Foo extends DataModelImpl<FooState> implements 
    IDataModel<FooState> {...}

Then you use it like so:

    const foo:IDataModel<FooState> = new Foo()
    foo.updateState(state => state.myNumber = 10)

Anything that wants to be notified when myNumber changes:

    const callback = (num:number) => {...}
    const unsubscribe = foo.watch(state => state.myNumber,callback);

    ...

    unsubscribe()

I've bound this to React, Vue and other view libraries. It even works properly with nested objects.

Drawback is that it uses Observers. I believe the next "killer state library" will use a pattern like what I've described above.

.watch? Reminds me of angularjs :)

Hah, that's right :)

One of my favourite parts of ReasonReact is that reducers are built in, out of the box. The Future-Fetcher feature coming in React reminds me of that; I recently built a React Native app that has 99.8% Flow type coverage, that’s meaningful and has caught dozens of bugs as the team worked on it. Having nice state management built into React will be lovely, and subsume a lot of the type imports or duplication that using Redux, React and Flow together currently requires.

"However, fast forward to 2018 and React.js is the popular choice for React.js development."

Huh?

Brought to you by Erowid Blog Post v4.5!

"With Future Fetcher Dan Abramovich pushes for interacting with objects and it's methods directly rather than."

Rather than what?

In fact another article linked ends pretty abruptly too.

Perhaps referring to react compatible libraries?

In the future, JS libs will be popular for 15 minutes.

I will keep using VanilaJS, nothing else is worthwhile unless to pump up CVs.

So for every project you implement solutions to common problems differently?

We use server side rendering with minimal JavaScript for dynamic behaviors.

ASP.NET, Spring and JEE work just fine.

The answer to the complexity of JS and associated frameworks/libraries cannot simply be "stop making JS apps".

Don't get me wrong, I agree server side rendering is a lot simpler and solves many problems, but there are plenty of reasons to go with a full client-side app and in those cases libraries and frameworks, while not essential, are logical and sensible conclusions.

I rather prefer to eventually be able to use Web Components across all major browsers.

The spec constantly evolves. At some point, there will be web components "v2" and coding "regular" web components will be outdated. As the spec evolves, browsers will evolve at different paces & implement things differently. Such is the reality of cross platform development. The only constant is change itself. To deal with it we use tools like polyfills, libs, and frameworks.

That matters very little because our components are wrapped in ASP.NET, Spring, JEE components.

For the user of use components the difference will be quite thin, if at all.

Right, those things fall into the category of tools libs & frameworks. Like Carl Sagan says if you want to make an apple pie from scratch you have to first invent the universe. There's always going to be change and need to support backwards compatibility, so polyfills libraries & frameworks likely aren't going away anytime soon, even after web components are widely supported.

Dan's surname is Abramov, not Abramovich.

Also

  However, fast forward to 2018 and React.js is the popular choice for React.js development.

This whole article is full of misunderstandings and blatant mistakes. Hurried writing on between conf sessions?

I think it'll also be interesting to see how Apollo continues to evolve in this space as more people adopt GraphQL in their React apps. Apollo is getting more and more state management features that can handle lots of what Redux is doing:

https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/the-future-of-state-manageme...

Apollo uses Redux under the hood.

This is no longer the case with Apollo 2.0.

Not true for Apollo v2, it’s providing local state management via apollo-link-state plugin which works pretty well, and once they got the rest support working, it will be a very competitive alternative to redux.

We're using the Apollo stuff sometimes over in Angular apps also; at the moment I think this may be the strongest contender for a minimal code, declarative, "it just works" future.

This article is awful but Dan was tweeting about a big announcement in Iceland last week so there probably is something awesome here!

Good. Redux was never necessary for the vast majority of web apps, but too many people promoted it as such.

This video contains content from [Merlin] Beggars, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.

Watching the video on Future Fetcher it feels like we're just inventing the the web all over again.

Half the time is spent on novel new ways of adding in a loading spinner. Perhaps it's just his demo, but I can sense Roy Fielding shedding a tear.

I felt the same way. Felt like the ending of 2012 to me. Life begins again!

How does this compare to mobX?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com