Why I choose React Over Angular2

While there are many articles on Medium and many threads on Quora discussing the pros and cons of Reactjs and Angular2 I am going to offer a brief reiteration of why I chose to master one over the other.

Angular2 is a full-service framework which has tools for fetching data, processing it, displaying it on the screen, then handling user inputs like clicks and keypresses in an intelligent fashion. It has tools for fetching data, processing it, displaying it on the screen, then handling user input (like clicks or keypresses) in an intelligent fashion. I think Angular2 is more at home with engineers who are more familiar with statically typed languages, but that's just my opinion.

I preferred React to master because it takes a different approach. Its famous for being the View layer and what this means is that it organizes a bunch of code that is responsible for producing HTML for a user to view and interact with. There are no built in data fetching tools, nor built in data processing tools.

I personally like that because after learning and developing with Ruby on Rails for a couple of years, React was a nice breather for me. It allowed me to further my JavaScript skills by just letting me focus on the View for awhile, on the front-end.

As with many people, time and resources are limited for me, so I went with the framework that was easier to get started with. I already know HTML which helped with my understanding and mastering of JSX. I already knew basic JavaScript, so learning list building and event handling was a breeze.

The most (and only) complicated systems are understanding the differences between ‘props’ and ‘state’, but that's not all. Since React is not used by itself in the vast majority of applications, there are other libraries to master such as React Router, Redux, Redux Thunk, Redux Promise and so on. These are helper libraries that further along the functionality of your React application, but figuring out which ones you need can be a nightmare.

One of the downsides of being a React developer can be employability, if you are undergoing a technical interview. The React engineer testing you, will probably be an expert in a radically different set of libraries than you are, but you will be tested on those libraries he knows, not necessarily the ones you know.

By the way, I create video tutorials on Reactjs that will walk you through topics such as routing. Check it out here: MicroUrb