React Ultimate

This repo is not maintained. Check Unredux where our recent React experiments occur.

Tired of React Starters reexplaining another helloworld?

Dreamed of something closer to the industry?

Welcome to React Ultimate then.

This project aims to provide basic solutions for typical web app tasks. Bundling, indexing, pagination, filtering, sorting, CRUD, forms, authorization, tests, lints, live reloads,np isomorphic app, code sharing between server and browser... We're going to solve all such common tasks in a simplified, yet valueable form to provide a starting point for your next project.

Not everything of that is already here or has desired quality, but we're approaching. We're interested in the architecture that may be ported to different frameworks and even languages. React is not a final answer. Reactivity probably is.

Install

1. Download and unzip repo
2. Go to unzipped folder
3. Install static server with $ npm install http-server -g
4. Install packages with $ npm install

Note: Windows users should have Bash shell installed (instructions).

Dev Run

1. Check dev.env and load it into SHELL via $ . dev.env
2. Run Webpack-Server via $ npm run webpack-server (terminal #1)
3. Run Nodemon with $ npm start (terminal #2)
4. See localhost:8080 (or with other port you've set in dev.env)

Prod run

1. Create prod.env (see sample.env) and load it into SHELL via $ . prod.env
2. Run Webpack via $ npm run webpack (terminal #1)
3. Run Node with $ npm run node (terminal #2)
4. See http://yoursite.com:8080 (or with other port you've set in prod.env)

Lint

1. Run $ npm run eslint -s

Test

1. Run all tests with $ . .conf-test ; npm mocha -s
2. Run specific tests with $ . .conf-test ; npm test -- --grep "api/robots POST" -s (-- is an NPM syntax to pass arguments)

Notes

All React starters / tutorials suffer from being oversimplified. They don't show any architecture (the most complex part), only a basic file layouts at their best. TodoApps have similar issues: very specific, single page only, unrealistic models (one field), no backend, no validation, no users, etc. We want to approach this differently – provide application which is closer to production (not saying enterprise) level.

Absolute imports

One of the most annoying NodeJS limitation is the absence of absolute imports. By "absolute" we mean imports relative to the project root or some top-level folder.

Your imports look like import "foo" for libraries but turn into import "../../../../foo"; mess for app code. It's a well known problem because such statements are very hard to read and support. They tend to break every time you move files between folder.

Fortunately absolute imports can be emulated with some amount of twist. The requirement here is to keep IDE navigation and autocompletion features working. Script bin/install add symlinks for every project entry point like frontend or backend in node_modules. Browserify requires to keep package.json for every such entrypoint but Webpack is free of this limitation.

This project is 100% relative-imports free.

Flux vs Baobab

We don't use Flux. Check this and this for a shallow answer to why. See #98 for additional insides.

Immutable

We experimented with most popular libs: ImmutableJS, Mori and Seamless-Immutable. We tried our best, but the resulting code was really messy and bug-prone all the time. So we decided to switch to Ramda which is API incompatible with all of the above. It does not enforce immutability, but encourage it, having zero mutable operations in toolkit.

URL-bound vs URL-unbound components

All stateful components can be divided to URL-bound and URL-unbound. By definition, state of URL-bound components can be changed through URL. It allows to bookmark and share page link and reproduce expectable state by just entring page.

There is no namespacing in URL (we could add one, but URL is rather short for that sort of things, and we want to keep JSON API format in client for simplicity) that's why the possible number of URL-bound components is limited to one per page.

Another tradeoff is that new URL means ReactRouter.run is triggered which means redraw of the Root component which hurts rendering performance ().

To sum up: make primary (content) components either URL-bound or URL-unbound depending on your business priorities. Secondary components will always be URL-unbound.

Links

Wiki contains more information about this project.

Cycle-Ultimate is a newer version of this project built with CycleJS.