In this session Andrew will refactor an existing Angular web application to React, and then measure the outcomes to validate whether React is a viable alternative to Angular.
With Angular nearing its seventh year of life and approaching obselecense, is it time we entertain the idea of seeing new front-end frameworks? Andrew's inspiration for this framework promiscuity came from a conversation he had with colleagues one day around getting Angular to perform a particular task. The outcome of the particular conversation was much introspection as to why we put ourselves through such pain when developing software - so as any good developer does, Andrew is going to see what we can do to make the pain go away.
There has been a lot of noise around React lately, so in this session Andrew will take an existing Angular application and convert it to React to see how viable an alternative it is. To ensure he is being a sensible empirically-motivated person, he will measure the outcome of the conversion by some sensible criteria. By the end of the session we should have a good feel for whether React is a viable alternative for Angular, and compare and contrast areas in which either framework outperforms the other.
- Tell story of tristan trying to set prop in directive and mikes vs wolfy's solution, and the *magic* angular sometimes requires to make it work
- Compounded by Angulars impending obselesence, perhaps we may think it is a sensible time to start seeing other frameworks
- We want something to base our comparisons on
- Build a list of things you expect a javascript framework to do that makes for a nice application (componentization, lack of magic, reasonable barrier to entry, tesability etc)
- Show off Flog
- Mention the blog post that inspired Flog's architecture.
- Take people through a tour of how that architecture leads to nicely seperated components with no 'leaking' concerns i.e. shared scope, view-per-directive etc
- Point out some of the not-so-nice bits that we may want to 'fix'
- Can we achieve a similar nicely seperated architecture with react?
- Step through some checkins where we rebuild our application to use react (.. fill out detail here once we know it)
- We have reached feature parity.
- Revisit the list of points we wanted to compare on, and contrast the two applications on these points.
- Give a final holistic summary of choosing angular or react for a given application, along with caveats.