What does HackerNews think of react-starter-kit?

I can see how you came to that conclusion, but I'd offer a different perspective.

The problem in my opinion with the Javascript landscape is, as you said, the fact that it is too fractured.

If you follow the "modern best practices" to make a SPA, you are talking about pulling in at least: npm, webpack, react, react-router, lodash, redux, bootstrap, and perhaps much more.

You are going to need to set up each one of these to play nicely with each-other, and follow tutorials/guides for each one to get them set up before you can even begin to start writing code for your actual application. Just look at the getting started guide for webpack to see how complex this can already be [1].

Why can't there be a consensus on what tooling/libraries are "standard" for writing an SPA React application today? Setting up the above tooling/libraries should not take multiple hours for someone with no frontend experience, but it does.

There are "starter kits" [2] to try and solve this problem, but dear god just look at how many moving parts they already have!

---

My overarching point is this: the Javascript ecosystem does not seem interested in solving this issue ultimately. This fractured-but-whole approach to development seems to be the consensus for that ecosystem. And that's OK.

For a majority of non-frontend devs who would like to enter the frontend, though, it's not okay. And this change in mindset is what WebAssembly can bring. It brings a different ecosystem and a different set of people with diverse mindsets that you just can't find today in the JS ecosystem easily.

[1] https://webpack.js.org/guides/getting-started/ [2] https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit

I wish create-react-app was the only one way to start a React project, but it has its own limits:

- not intended for server-side React apps

- not intended for React components library

- not intended to be used with TypeScript but Flow (could change with the next major version tho)

Still, there are already so many alternatives, some of them just reinventing the wheel. Do we really need another one? I'm not sure.

- https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app (50k stars)

- https://github.com/react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate (19k stars)

- https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit (18k stars)

- https://github.com/davezuko/react-redux-starter-kit (10k stars)

- https://github.com/insin/nwb (3k5 stars, support Preact & Inferno & components libraries)

- https://github.com/zeit/next.js (26k stars, server-side support, very opinionated)

- and so on… just type "react boilerplate/starter/toolkit" on google. Most of them are out-of-date and not maintained, making the process of choosing one ever more overwhelming.

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

Redux-friendly, too.

React itself is actually a pretty simple library. The problem is that it's not the whole story, so you need other bits and pieces to put together a functional SPA. Ender redux, react-router, etc. And because React tries to explicitly not be so opinionated about what you should use, the way you learn about this stuff is not from the official tutorial, but from various blog posts.

There are also resources like this: https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit. On the surface it's great. But for my taste it's organized very poorly. You have all your reusable (NB: reusable != reused) components in one place, and all your pages in another. Each component consists of exactly 3 files that are 3 directory levels down. Pages (views? containers?) are in a separate directory structure where each page consists of 3 files that are 3 directory levels down. I guess if your SPA consists of hundreds of pages/views/containers with most components reused many times this makes sense. For my applications (low dozens of pages/views/containers) this seems like a huge overkill.

And don't get me started on the redux theory of all global state all the time, which actually seems to not be ideal for things like "I just want a more complex ", and you have a very scattered learning curve.

By contrast, Vue has a pretty sane slightly opinionated learning curve. Sure, there are a few things you need to figure out (XHR/Websockets + VueX + promises don't have a decent recipe in the docs), but overall it's much more coherent.

Everything will just work with defaults. Not like this travesty: https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit

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

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