There is a certain paradox with teaching something like Redux, in that it's designed to make complex systems easy to understand and manageable. Yet when trying to demonstrate with a simple example, it appears hugely over complex and unnecessary.

I think a pre-requisite to learning something like Redux (or any micro-architecture) is to first try building something without it. Once you understand the pains of undisciplined, organically designed, spaghetti applications, the cynicism is replaced by excitement over how this will improve your job/life/application.

>> it appears hugely over complex and unnecessary

Which it is, actually!

Think about how MVC works in iOS, or ASP.NET MVC or JSP Model 2, etc. In the case of the latter two, your state is stored in the session as simple, regular objects. Have you felt the need for actions and reducers and immutability etc. when using session state? I have not.

When programming JavaScript SPA, you can program in the style of MVC also. There is no need for actions, reducers and so on, unless your app is for example a word processor and you need undo/redo (as mentioned by another comment on this thread.) Most of the time you are getting data from the backend, temporarily storing stuff in memory, modifying it and sending it back to the backend. There is no need for actions/reducers and such other nonsense for that.

When I mention this someone always points me to the "you may not need redux" article by the creator of redux, in an attempt to legitimize some use cases of redux. There may indeed be some legitimate uses cases for redux. But it has become the de facto standard way of building React applications, and that's totally unjustified.

Agreed! Redux is cool but often overkill for basic CRUD apps, which the majority of JavaScript SPAs tend to be. My approach has been to take a long look at the app structure - if there's a way to refactor it to remove Redux (or what have you), that's probably the most sensible thing to do. Simple code > clever code where performance and maintainability are concerned.

I wouldn't mind a use case where Redux would be necessary or at least beneficial, for the practice, but I've yet to run across it after building half a dozen or more SPAs. These would be enterprise SPAs used in production, btw.

Hey, this is a bit tangental but since you mention building enterprise SPAs I'll guess your experience will be able to help me. So, I'm not as experienced but can get around to learning any code and as I need to start building a portfolio I dove in again to build one. But things were breaking and I couldn't get rolling as fast I thought and although for a longer term bigger project I would spend the time tweaking I want to get something up fast and thought that I need to use a simpler tool. So, I'm curious what to you use to build your SPAs? What's the process like for you? Thanks

https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit

Redux-friendly, too.