After 20+ years of writing web applications, I’ve seen many technologies come and go. I’ve seen the circular nature of popular technology. I tend not to get into the latest web framework excitement. Mullets are fine, they were popular years ago. I hear they’re coming back… but different? Hmmm, not impressed.
Additionally, asking which framework is ‘the best’ tends to be a silly question. I mean… Which is the best car? It depends. The same is true for web frameworks. But, to be fair, when people ask such a question they’re allowing for at least some of this reality. So, while I’m not going to act like this is *always* true, but…
React is actually better than Angular and View.js
Why? Because, it is dramatically easier to learn and be productive with.
Angular is a mess of boilerplate code. View.js isn’t much better. All have good communities but from my experience React’s community is more effective, probably bigger. One argument that I’ve seen many times and previously made myself is that Angular is good because it includes everything you need to build robust apps. Two problems with this idea:
1. Do you REALLY need that robustness? I promise you that unless you KNOW the answer is yes, then it is NO.
2. If you’re not going to use it all, why the heck have it all there?
With the power of NPM and Webpack, it no longer makes sense to worry about having all the things “built-in”. The reality is that Angular does NOT play nice with many frameworks and libraries you might like to use. Ultimately, React is just a more elegant design in my not-so-humble opinion. Developing in React looks like the following two steps:
1. Google what you want to do
2. Run nom install for whatever library or additional framework you need
3. Write a little bit of totally understandable code
4. Rinse and repeat
After my intro, and given my long history of not being ‘religious’ about software technology, why am I being so outspoken about React? Because I started out disliking it. I refused for years to mess with it. Instead, I spent a few months getting comfortable with Angular and did some View.js. The Angular experience was painful… lots of boilerplate crap that often didn’t work for stupid reasons. It was hard to make sense of what was going on. I had to learn tons of new constructs only to forget them a week after not using them. It was bad. I then tried out React. It literally took me minutes to get up-to-speed.
Case closed.
Sincerely,
Yours Truly… Michael Dwyer
Chaordic LLC 