Andrew H. Farmer, a web developer, writes React tutorials and comparisons of tools such as starter kits and AJAX libraries.
HN commenters recommend his React starter project finder, getting-started tutorial and AJAX library comparison to people learning React.
first project submission from a newbie coder so I'm a little nervous...
this was made to solve a pain point of mine which was 1) not having a good mental framework around deciding whether a boilerplate or starter kit was worth investing time in and 2) not being able to search for boilerplates by the desired stack.
Basically I wanted a npms.io for github boilerplates instead of single npm libraries. I hate the "awesome-foobar" movement because it is just a reinvention of yahoo and gets stale extremely quickly while not taking advantage of obvious metadata. A good attempt was made by Andrew Farmer here: http://andrewhfarmer.com/starter-project/ but it didnt have the metrics i thought would be obvious to incorporate.
you can plug in literally any framework to see how it ranks as long as it's on github. No login required unless you want to review/favorite/search boilerplates. See: https://packagejason.herokuapp.com/sahat/hackathon-starter
This is just a first release, i have a public trello board up here: https://trello.com/b/u28EAYJ5/swyx-boilerpl8 and the code is open source here: https://github.com/sw-yx/packageJason. it is built on top of https://github.com/cleverbeagle/pup which is built on top of Meteor.
This is great since it provides an OFFICIAL opinionated set of tools for building React apps which is typically the largest barrier of entry for new developers looking to experiment with this technology.
However, it is missing a lot of core features that typically come standard with Webpack/React boilerplates. Directly from their Github:
Some features are currently not supported:
Server rendering.
Testing.
Some experimental syntax extensions (e.g. decorators).
CSS Modules.
LESS or Sass.
Hot reloading of components.
So a great first set of features for a simple React starter project, but for those of you looking to expand the development toolkit from this currently limited configuration, check out the following link to search React boiler projects on github based on a number of criteria like the ability to search by features included such as CSS Modules, Hot Module Replacement, etc.
http://andrewhfarmer.com/starter-project/
For those looking to learn more about the ecosystem, the following resource lists might be useful.
More React resources: https://github.com/enaqx/awesome-react
React/Redux resource links: https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links
Yeah, additionally React has a serious paradox of choice problem.
Which of the dozens of CSS solutions should I use? Inline styles or not? Which of the dozens of Flux libraries? Isomorphic/universal or client side? If Isomorphic, Express or Koa? Does react-router work with the choices I've made? Webpack or Browserify? It goes on and on...
I love React, but the environment and best practices are unclear to say the least.
Just look at how many starter kits there are and how big they tend to be: http://andrewhfarmer.com/starter-project/
Can only imagine how many of the choices made are going to be deprecated in a couple months.
Edit: Heh, and now that I've read the article, I see they hit on this issue. :)
By passing down callback functions as props. One of the basic patterns of React is that parents communicate to their children by passing down data as props, and they also pass down callback functions that a child can execute to communicate upwards.
There's a great article that describes various component communication patterns at http://andrewhfarmer.com/component-communication/ .
http://andrewhfarmer.com/getting-started-tutorials/ has a list of tutorial reviews.
I'm the author of http://buildwithreact.com/tutorial, which Andrew says "is by far the shortest tutorial and the easiest read" :) Happy to answer any questions on twitter.
Interesting, never occurred to me that react-router could be the problem, I will investigate that. But this other post [1] didn't use React at all and made API requests to GitHub with the same problem.
[1] http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/