Re:Angular 2 versus React
by EvanPlaice on Wednesday January 06, 2016 @01:55PM
(#10852680)
What we really need is a web standard that allows devs to plug-in a custom templating language extension.
It's dumb that the browser renders HTML, a framework bootstraps, parses the template, then re-renders the view.
90% of the front-end frameworks exist to provide templating + some special set of features.
If we standardize a pre-render hook to plugin custom templating engines then frameworks can shift to focus only on their implementation specific strategies (ex data binding).
I actually think frameworks are too monolithic, and we feel the pain of that, but no one has figured out how to do something more granular yet. To a large extent that's a community administration problem, not a technical one, which is why you don't see a lot of computer scientists trying to do it. Though it will require some technical chops too.
Node/NPM, and UNIX before it, are attempts in this direction. It's not really gelling yet though. The various component systems are trying, but inevitably fail because they are trapped in a single layer of the framework stack. I think we need a few more breakthroughs in social organizational strategies (things like Flickr, Uber, Bitcoin, etc) before it becomes obvious how to do it.