Author: Michael Dwyer

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

My name is Michael Dwyer and this is Chaordic. My goal is to bring order with technology, particularly software products and platforms.

After 23 years of software development experience from early startups to Fortune 500 companies, I decided to start my own consultancy. I am a programmer at heart. Despite 10+ years of leadership and management, I remain a deep, hands-on, full stack developer. I made a career out of being the rare executive that can hang in the deepest of technology discussions with software engineers and architects. I’ve never allowed myself to get too far away from the code. I’ve found creative ways to be “in the code” even when it wasn’t my primary responsibility.

An incessant reader and lifelong learner, I have a strong sense of all the latest best practices. And yet, I have the practical experience to get past the hype. I love lightweight software development processes, particularly Scrum and Lean. These practices, as with many, are simple on the surface but rarely done well. I’ve probably seen most of the ways practice falls short of theory.

If you’re in south central Missouri, stop into our office at 18462 Main St., Eminence MO. Yes, believe it or not, you can find a word-class software products and platform consultancy in extremely rural Missouri; in Eminence, a town of 600 strong. Of course, this is possible due to the power of the Internet so… no need to stop by our office. Just send us a message. We’d love to see how we can help.