React is idiomatic javascript. Vue is it's own quirky thing that doesn't feel anything at all like Javascript to me.
At the end of the day, I think that calling something idiomatic is subjective and so, varies from people to people.
*: to be clear, my point is many people use JSX with React because it feels idiomatic (I manipulate HTML/DOM, so why not just write with HTML-like syntax?) but it is not idiomatic to JavaScript and I don't think the other React APIs are that nice to use. If I didn't use JSX with React, I'd tend to use other framework because, in my opinion, they make more sense.
Hater-or-lover of JSX, it is definitely an intuitive way to think about HTML in the context of JS.
I prefer the vue model that's a bit closer to the metal, though, if only because of quirks like className
Mithril has "class" instead of "className"; that irks me too.
When I look at the guide and I see stuff like this:
<div id="app-2">
<span v-bind:title="message">
Hover your mouse over me for a few seconds
to see my dynamically bound title!
</span>
</div>
In contrast, React is a JS library, and works like any other. JSX is weird for the first minute, but it's a very light transformation to the underlying JS, to the point where when I write it I can mentally see what JS functions I'm invoking, which therefore helps me understand all those things I mentioned before like scoping rules, what this will refer to, etc.
If you know plain javascript you know half of what makes react. The API surface usually consists of a single function: render. The rest are 3-4 class lifecycles, setState, a few jsx semantics and that's it. You solve problems in the same way you always solved them, there is nothing to re-learn and you don't bend to the framework.
Go ahead and re-create this in Vue, tell me what you're doing is easier:
import timestamp from 'time-stamp'
const Header = props => <h1>{props.text}</h1>
const Main = () => <Header text={timestamp()} />
ReactDom.render(<Main />, document.querySelector('#app'))
Once you get rolling both of them are good but it's no easy task to start-up a React project on your own. You need a lot libraries, have to twiddle with immutability which is no piece of cake with JS and be constantly aware of small quirks like keys when looping jsx-elements, className instead of class, how to add css preprocessor, using setState instead of directly assigning to it with the constant farce with deeply nested Object.assigning oh such fun.
React tries to make the world a better place with more theoretical approach while Vue focuses on tried-and-true methods that work and are straight-forward for everyone with a little experience in programming. (v-if might not be pretty but it beats JSX conditional) Granted modern frontend development has a lot of different things to be aware of that make it bit difficult for beginners but IMO Vue makes it a lot more simpler and productive. Some things I wish might be better like the ecosystem but oh well. Overall I'm happier and the only problem is having to fight off overly smug React-developers who have rubbed their egos so hard that they aren't able to even think about better solutions anymore.
> be constantly aware of small quirks like keys when looping
There are no "quirks" in looping anything. It is plain javascript. I would call "v-for" a quirk on the other hand.
const array = []
for (let item of items)
array.push(<li>{item.text}</li>)
render (
<ul>
{array}
</ul>
)
Also you can use `items.map` in your example.
The example would run without keys, it's merely for demonstration. You'd need keys in Vue as well.
• lifecycle method names: mounted vs componentDidMount
• proptypes: builtin vs `import PropTypes from 'prop-types'`
• component creation: basic JS object vs ES6 class extending `React.component`
Please don't spread misinformation because you prefer one way of writing frontend apps to another. React is better at complex apps, and Vue has a simpler API that many find easier to memorize.
It's rude to insult other commenters by saying "A beginner could blink at this once and start making simple apps blindfolded." I think you're being hyperbolic, but it comes off as condescending.
Frontend is hard. No one "blinks at this once" and learns how to build component-based layouts with view, data, and logic. Please be nice.
> Frontend is hard. No one "blinks at this once" and learns how to build component-based layouts with view, data, and logic. Please be nice.
You seem to purposely misunderstand me. I never said someone could learn react by looking at it. I said someone could understand the nature of simple composition by looking at it.
I learned Vue fully in maybe a few weeks. React in an hour here: egghead.io/courses/react-fundamentals If you think that studying a 70 page document in order to carry out basics like composition is easy then so be it. If you'd actually dare to post the example in Vue, we'd all see how "easy" the hoops would be you'd have to jump through to realize it.
I've never coded in React or Vue but after spending 15 mins reading https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/render-function.html here's a pure JS re-creation in Vue for you (fiddle here: https://jsfiddle.net/0wr6xskh/):
<div id="app"></div>
const MyHeader = Vue.component('MyHeader', {
render: function (createElement) {
return createElement('h1', this.text)
},
props: {
text: {
type: String,
required: true
}
}
});
new Vue({
el: '#app',
render: function (createElement) {
return createElement('div',[
createElement(MyHeader, {
props: {
text: ''+new Date()
}
})
])}
});
function Header(props) {
return <h1>{props.text}</h1>;
}
function Main() {
return <Header text={new Date()}/>;
}
ReactDom.render(<Main />, document.querySelector('#app'))I don't think that's reacts fault? http://exploringjs.com/es6/index.html#toc_ch_first-steps
Other than the es6 syntax, would you like to specify what it is that you don't understand? If you look at it, it must occur to you that react components are functions that can receive properties and return markup. Now you can compose these functions. Just like in Vue or any other framework there is a single mounting point. If you understand this, you know the largest part of the react library.
const Foo = () => <span>hey</span>
function Foo() {
return <span>hey</span>
}
And if i asked you to use this component in another, even if you saw how it's done, you would absolutely not be able to pull it off again?
function Bar() {
return <Foo />
}
To be honest, i thought i didn't like react as well when i first encountered it. I didn't actually try to understand, the appearance of it seemed so radically different that i refused to think of it as simple. But i eventually tried and figured that there is actually nothing behind this framework. These are plain functions, or classes with lifecycles. I was wrong in my assumptions.
Usually not a problem but some issues on Github are in "Chinese" (not sure if Mandarin or Cantonese sorry) so not very helpful.
If you want more choices for those libs (at the cost of potentially more dependency update hell) React is great and more popular.
Admittedly there are tooling gaps with projects like Polymer, but these are being addressed. YouTube.com is already in production built with Polymer.
So just leaving this comment here to encourage everyone to rethink the framework defaults of React/Vue in 2017.
- React uses JSX and JS logic for render methods. Vue usually uses templates, although JSX is also supported.
- While React _can_ be used as a plain script tag, it's usually compiled as part of a build step. Vue can be compiled, but it seems friendlier to the "drop-in script tag" approach.
- The Vue community values official integrated addons for routing and state management. The React community prefers a "pick-and-choose your own adventure" approach.
- Since React has been around longer, there's probably more React components and related libraries available
- A larger percentage of the Vue community is located in China
The best comparison of Angular, React, and Vue I've seen thus far is at https://medium.com/unicorn-supplies/angular-vs-react-vs-vue-... . It lays out a lot of the similarities and differences in a fair way, and gives some suggestions for why you might pick one over the others.
What I fail to see is how I would choose one over the other for different types of projects. To me, it's a choice a person or a team makes for all projects at once. Jumping back and forth between stacks here would be a lot like jumping back and forth between Django and Ruby on Rails. They aim to solve the same thing, and if you can use one effectively then why would you reach for the other?
I hate that facebook has basically made a new version of javascript.
I don't like facebook as a company and prefer software that is made by people who aren't told "go make this" by their boss.
Facebook has thrown out all of the previous approaches and just started again. This is good for things like the virtual dom, as the alternatives never worked to begin with, but bad for things like html templates, which have worked fine.
The problem with combining javascript and html (JSX) is that the javascript gets in the way and you can't really see what the component looks.
If there's any huge company that gives engineers relative freedom to build what they want, Facebook is definitely it.
I'd recommend react over Vue any day of the week, to answer ops question. Vue.js is everything I hated about Angular. String based dependency injection, bizzare attibute syntax, highly opinionated.
React is everything I love about javascript. Functional, fast, and with an easy to reason about API.
Opinionated: React is a library written for a language that is not JavaScript (the first prototype was written in OCaml). It demands immutability, which JS has no native support for. it wants you to use FP, but JS natively has little support for FP both in its standard library and syntax. FP only looks good in JS if you've never used a real FP language.
DSL: JSX is a DSL - I can't remember the last time I've seen someone use && as a poor man's if statement, or ternary statements dozens of lines long until I started writing JSX. JSX is neither idiomatic JavaScript nor HTML.
Fast: Performance benchmarks (which admitted are flawed as they can't capture real-world usage) show that React and Vue have similar rendering speeds. Vue's computed property dependency tracing means that a lot of the performance optimizations which require manual work to enable in React (manually memoize expensive computation, shouldComponentUpdate, PureComponent etc.) are handled automatically by the framework.
Nothing in React forces you in any way to use ternaries. You can do all your pre-calculation in the render method, and if that's your style you would most certainly do that.
const Say = ({ reverse, text }) => {
if (reverse)
text = text.split('').reverse().join('')
return <div>{text}</div>
}
<Say reverse text="hello" />
template: `
<li v-for="(item, index) in items">
{{ index > 2 ? item : item.split('').reverse().join('') }}
</li>`
It doesn't do that at all. Even redux uses plain shallow copies. Vue on the other hand does exactly that, it uses observables which aren't supported in most browsers. Reason why as of version 3 you will maintain two codebases (one for IE11 and prior, one for evergreen) since Proxies aren't back-compatible.
> it wants you to use FP
Not at all. It is unopinionated.
You don't need native support, just don't mutate state when calling setState, which is a pretty simple rule to follow.
> it wants you to use FP,
This isn't really true. React components are often written as ES6 classes and stateless functional components are only functional insomuch as they are literally just a function. I can't think of any advanced FP concepts that are necessary for idiomatic React.
> JSX is a DSL
Technically true, but in practice it is just ES6 and the HTML side of JSX so closely resembles actual HTML that the DSL criticism loses most of its meaning.
> I've seen someone use && as a poor man's if statement
It may be a code smell, but it's certainly valid JavaScript and not a technique that could be correctly described as contributing to the idea that JSX is a "DSL". Also, you don't have to do that, just use an if statement or a ternary operation to compute your result outside of the JSX block and reference the resulting variable in the template part of the render function.
This is incorrect. React was written first in JavaScript in the Facebook Ads org, to be used in the Ads Create Flow application. Jordan's dive into OCaml came later, which is why we now have Reason many years later.
JSX is such a perfect fit that I take umbrage with people who sneer at it. What better way is there to bridge the gap between the DOM and Javascript? And JSX isn't exclusive to React anymore. That's testament to how useful and practical JSX is. I can see JSX becoming bona fide standard like HTML.
I learned react before vue and found it great compared to angular but lately I've been using vue. It is quickier and neater with the bizzare syntax and lighter overall.
With the latest release I have the urge to go back.
I guess will stand out and prosper the one with the largest adoption (to this point, React). All this looks exactly like the old jQuery vs Mootools vs Prototype debate 10 years ago.
History repeats itself.
You can use Vue as plain JS. You don't lose much by abandoning the single file components.
> React is just Javascript.
Except the entire ecosystem is designed to steer you toward JSX which is not "just Javascript".
const A = () => <div>hello</div>
const A = () => h(“div“, null, “hello“)
The opposite of an opinionated framework is an opinionated user-base.
You ask what should I use for X (routing, state management, HTTP requests, etc, etc) and every react developer gives you a different combination of answers, and you have no good way to figure out which combination is the best.
I much rather the framework answer those questions for me so I can focus on getting shit done and actually building the thing I want to build.