Request for Discussion: Redux "boilerplate", learning curve, abstraction, and opinionatedness

[markerikson]

Resolution: use Redux Toolkit

The ideas in this thread eventually turned into our official Redux Toolkit package. It includes utilities to simplify many common Redux use cases, including store setup, reducer definition, immutable update logic, creating entire "slices" of state automatically without writing any action creators or action types by hand, and even automatic data fetching and caching with the "RTK Query" API.

For more details on what problems Redux Toolkit is meant to solve, see the "Vision for Redux Toolkit" manifesto I wrote .

The number one complaint I see about Redux is that there's "too much boilerplate". I also frequently see complaints that there's too much to learn, too many other addons that are needed to do anything useful, and too many aspects where Redux doesn't have any opinion and therefore doesn't offer any kind of built-in guidance.

I just had a discussion with @tannerlinsley regarding several of these aspects. We discussed the Jumpstate library, which is an abstraction layer around Redux, and how it was intended to ease the learning curve, as well as various philosophical opinions about what constitutes "good" Redux usage.

Out of that, we came up with several questions that I would like to bring up for wider discussion:

Key points

Boilerplate / Verbosity

• Redux is not intended to be the "most concise way of doing things", but rather to make data flow obvious and readable
• Docs are written in a deliberately verbose style for clarity and learning, and not specifically intended as "the one true way to write Redux code", but that style has been somewhat blindly adopted (or, sometimes, resulted in rejecting Redux)
• Frequent complaints about "boilerplate", such as "too many files", "use of action creators", etc

Abstractions and Learning

• The core Redux library itself is effectively feature-complete, but there's lots of interesting addons and tools being built by the community
• Various abstraction libs have been built to "ease learning curve" or "make things more OOP", but most of these are not really "idiomatic" Redux usage
• Redux learning curve can be steep, but once you grasp concepts, the need for abstraction layers often goes away

Problems

• What are the "boilerplate" complaints mostly about?
• What are the hardest aspects of Redux for new learners?
• What are the "no opinions" areas that cause problems for people?

Potential Solutions

• What would idiomatic Redux usage with "less boilerplate" look like? How can we provide solutions to those complaints?
• What possible abstractions could be created that simplify the process of learning and usage, but without actually hiding Redux (and would hopefully provide a migration/learning path to "base" Redux)?
• How much of this could be solved with improved docs in some way?

I would like to invite the community to offer up complaints, pain points, and concerns about using Redux, and hopefully also provide suggestions and ideas for solving those problems as well.

[modernserf]

A few ideas:

• official redux-preset package containing redux, react-redux, redux-thunk already wired together
• dispatch(actionType, payload) could reduce need for action creators
• built-in jumpstate-style reducer creators, e.g. createReducer({[actionType]: (state, payload) => state}, initState)

[e-schultz]

Most people I know who use redux heavily, end up moving away from redux-thunk as they find it doesn't scale very well, and ends up leading to action creators that start doing way too much, and rather use something else for managing side-effects like redux-observable or redux-saga.

I can understand the appeal in it, especially when getting started with redux - but I'm not sure if bundling it as part of a 'best practice boilerplate package' would be the best idea.

[Phoenixmatrix]

So, this part is the more critical to me (this will not so much be ideas to solve the problem, but rather constraints that are, at least to me, important):

Redux is not intended to be the "most concise way of doing things", but rather to make data flow obvious and readable

A great thing about Redux is how it's almost more of a design pattern than a framework, and all the code you see (aside for the store and react-redux) is your own.

Looking at Jumpstate (I did not know about it until now), it's one of the first abstraction layers I see for Redux that looks good. Great even! But at the same time, it brings you only a hair away from other frameworks like MobX, and having multiple frameworks that bring in the same thing to the table isn't super useful. So focusing on what makes Redux different from the rest is important, not just how we can make Redux better in a vacuum (because it lives in the same world as other tools).

Another thing of importance, is that a lot of challenges newcomers have when they hit Redux isn't Redux itself, but JavaScript. Other big frameworks like Angular abstract away JavaScript itself. Writing a Redux reducer is simply applying vanilla javascript "design patterns", which may not be familiar to newcomers, and will make people want to use a black box instead.

Finally, a lot of boilerplate reduction libraries try to add a 1:1:1 relationship between components, reducers and action creators (maybe not all 3, but often 2 of those), which makes newcomers forget they can have multiple reducers handling an action, multiple components using state from multiple reducers, and so on. That's one of the #1 question I answer at work and other places, and it's super useful. So tool to help in that area should not lose this (also, "switch are icky" isn't the best argument in the world).

So IMO, CTAs would involve linking good vanilla JavaScript resources, as well as documenting more of the "why" right along the "getting started" concepts, and keeping things simple. You can build gigantic applications in Redux without learning many new concepts at all. While I'm a redux-observable guy myself, I've seen multi-hundred-thousand lines of code apps using Thunk without issues (and Ive seen tiny apps make a trainwreck with thunks). Introducing very few "core" concepts and showing how they can be applied to tons of concepts helps a lot.

The "all boilerplates must be reduced no matter the cost" is an issue with the software engineering community as a whole these days...thats harder to tackle.

[alex35mil]

From the very beginning my main concern w/ redux was that either I read or write a code, I had to jump between N files, b/c logic of the single UI part is scattered all over the codebase between actions, action types and several reducers. I really like that I can reach out to any part of the state tree from every place in UI and I can change the different parts of the state in response to a single action (main reasons why I use redux), but the more parts of the state I change in response to a single action, the more my logic is blured. I can't simply read or write what's happened when user did this or that. But what I want is can be described like this:

// meta code
dispatch(ACTION);

onAction = {
  ACTION: [
    // handler 1: hide spinner here,
    // handler 2: change status there,
    // handler 3: update entity
  ],
};

In the end I came up with redux-interactions + redux-tree and I'm pretty happy w/ it so far.

[thejmazz]

Approach in our current project:

note, would be very different depending on application requirements :) once we add in realtime object updates, perhaps sagas or observables would provide benefit over thunk/promise

• redux-thunk
• promise middleware
• our "api wrapper", which is a wrapper around client feathers app, service(name, method, ...opts) which is an action creator with payload being a promise to call our API (i.e. promise middleware picks it up and dispatches x_FULFILLED, x_PENDING, and x_REJECTED). could also overwrite name of action for this.

We first use componentDidMount() to call our API, store data in component state. However, we use our api wrapper for this, which means an action is still sent out (and logged by logger middleware, including meta which is request info), and if we so desire to refactor into using the store for that component all we need to is add a reducer which listens on the action. We start by using local state only, and refactor into redux when that component's state needs to be accessed/modified from another component. That being said, I see the attraction of using redux everywhere, as it provides a paper trail for everything. Given our current team and application timeline, it's just not beneficial for us atm.

I've played with redux-saga a bit, but since our most complicated async flow is login/logout, which works (and code is not terribly complicated), not much of a huge reason to switch (but might be worth it for testing reasons - iterable + mocks is a nice way to test). redux-observable I don't see the immediate benefit unless observables would themselves provide benefit, for example, if you want to double-click events nicely.

We've gotten a bit away from boilerplate by having our own factory functions to return reducers, and having our own higher order reducers on top of custom functionality (e.g. a reducer on top of "paginator" so that content is paginated but can have custom actions to modify an item).

What I think needs to be done is a giant tutorial working up from a basic react app, demonstrate issues that come up with inter-component communication, then introduce redux, then go onwards, demonstrating problems that occur under specific situations, and how they can be helped with redux-x. That is, a guide for when and what to use. There are definitely some blog posts that exist out there with discussion in this direction.

What's also relevant is my summary I came up with for patterns used in gothinkster/react-redux-realworld-example-app

[jasonrhodes]

Most people I know who use redux heavily, end up moving away from redux-thunk as they find it doesn't scale very well

I understand what you're saying, but here's my flip-side concern: we're seeing more and more anecdotal evidence that a huge group of JS devs aren't even using arrow functions and other baseline ES(6|2015) features yet, due to lack of understanding, intimidation, etc. Expecting folks who want to get started with Redux, and who could benefit from learning the patterns that Redux introduces, to first learn observables or generators is I think probably asking too much?

Redux-thunk is also slightly complex in the sense that redux middleware in general kind of bends your brain, but it's at least just functions/callbacks, which are easy to pick up if you are writing JS at all. I really like the idea of having a complete package of related tools to get started with, available via a single download, even if it's pitched as "learn-redux" instead of "best-practice-always-redux". Similar to how create-react-app needs tweaking as you learn all the things it set up for you, this could encourage your own tweaking, maybe show how to convert a simple redux-thunk setup to using sagas, etc. as its own form of "ejecting" ...

Just some thoughts.

[Phoenixmatrix]

I understand what you're saying, but here's my flip-side concern: we're seeing more and more anecdotal evidence that a huge group of JS devs aren't even using arrow functions and other baseline ES(6|2015) features yet, due to lack of understanding, intimidation, etc. Expecting folks who want to get started with Redux, and who could benefit from learning the patterns that Redux introduces, to first learn observables or generators is I think probably asking too much?

Bingo! We're in an environment where a LOT of people are new to JS (or they "know" JS, but it's not their specialty, and they start from the deep end). Especially if those folks are experienced software engineers from another ecosystem (java, rails, etc), they will quickly try and apply the concepts they know before learning the ones they don't, and it won't quite work and they get stuck. I don't know what's the best way to convince folks to get a deep understanding of JS before jumping in a functional UX design pattern though.

[sunjay]

Note that the Redux docs do have a section about Reducing Boilerplate for those of you reading who are looking for something now and don't want to adopt an entire library on top of Redux.

We should be a little careful about this discussion and realize that this has probably been bikeshedded a lot already. The Redux team has heard, considered and rejected a lot of things that will probably get proposed here. It's quite possible that nothing will come out of this discussion if we only fight about things that have already been discussed.

That being said, I think it's a great idea to talk about ways to make the framework more accessible to everyone (new and experienced).

Anything you propose to reduce boilerplate should be such that it is possible to go back to the stuff below the abstraction whenever needed. It is not fun to adopt an abstraction just to drop it later to go back to the lower level stuff because you needed one extra thing that the authors of the abstraction didn't think of.

Redux learning curve can be steep, but once you grasp concepts, the need for
abstraction layers often goes away

I'm wondering, if this is the case, what parts of Redux are we suggesting to improve? What parts would you remove or abstract over that you wouldn't need to immediately add back in?

This is a diagram of the entire react/redux lifecycle I made for a talk at work about a year ago:

There are quite a few parts of this, but I can't imagine Redux working as well without any one of them. Containers are kind of annoying at times, but if you remove them, you deeply couple your view logic with your data layout. If you remove actions, you're basically MVC again which is missing the point of using Redux in the first place. The "view" in that diagram already barely exists because it can be modeled as just a function that subscribes to the store and renders react components.

I don't think there is a lot of boilerplate to remove in the overall framework itself. Maybe you're referring to boilerplate in the individual parts of the framework like in action creators, reducers, or containers. In that case, the tips from the Reducing Boilerplate page mentioned above address most of those things already. We don't need anything on top of that to make it any "better". (Note: It's not that I'm not open to adding something to make things better, I just don't see it yet.)

Maybe this isn't so much a reducing boilerplate problem but a problem of improving Redux education. If the framework is hard to grok for beginners, we may need to improve the Redux docs and make it more accessible. Maybe some of the reducing boilerplate tips need to be advertised more aggressively in the docs.

Reducing the amount of steps required (boilerplate) does not always solve the problem. To stress my point from the very beginning of my post, you don't want to write an abstraction that will get thrown away because you didn't think of every way people would need to use it.

[markerikson]

Some good discussion so far. Lemme toss out a few quick examples of common "boilerplate"-related complaints that I see:

• "Why do I have to write 'action creator' functions just to return an object immediately?"
• "I have to touch SOOO many files just to add a simple new feature! Also, I keep repeating the same names over and over for constants and function names and..."
• "Why do I need these 'middleware' things just to make an AJAX call?"
• "Why do I have to use switch statements for everything?"
• "Why do I need this dispatch thing? Why do I have to wrap up all these functions to make them work?"

And some specific examples of these types of comments:

• Implementing Redux is tedious. But it doesn't have to be.
• Minimal Redux setup
• Jumpstate README and Jumpstate + Redux + CRA - no dispatching or action creators needed!

[markerikson]

And to immediately toss out some responses to those "boilerplate" concerns: of those five categories listed, only "use of dispatch" is actually required. For the rest:

• You don't have to use action creators, but it's a good practice for consistency (per my post Idiomatic Redux: Why use action creators? )
• You don't have to have completely separate files for action creators, action constants, and reducers. The "ducks" pattern is a popular approach for putting all of those in one file together. That does have the downside of "hiding" the ability to have multiple reducers listen to one action. Redux ultimately doesn't care what your file structure is.
• You can do async work outside of Redux completely, like in a component. But, per Dan's description at Why do we need middleware for async flow in Redux?, it's usually good to extract that logic outside of components, and middleware provide a "loophole" for doing async work while having access to the Redux store.
• You definitely don't have to use switch statements in reducers, they're just the most "obvious" way of handling multiple values for a given variable. Lookup tables, if/else statements, and anything else you want are just fine (per FAQ: Do I have to use switch statements? )
• You do need to actually call store.dispatch() to make anything useful happen - that's a basic design decision of Redux. Binding up action creators makes it possible to pass them around to unconnected child components and still have them dispatch whenever the function is called.

So overall, there's almost nothing out of these "boilerplate" concerns that's required. It's a combination of examples from the docs and "good programming practices" like de-duplicating code and separation of concerns.

[sunjay]

I think the questions brought up by @markerikson are really fair and I have asked them myself at some point in the past as well.

Redux is in a sense a "low-level" library for data modelling. Like any such low-level library, it exposes a lot of things that you could easily abstract over in order to account for the majority of cases. I think the reason @gaearon didn't originally do that is because he wanted to keep the library as small and flexible as possible. Thanks to that decision, we're able to build a lot of different things on top of Redux without needing to have everything in the Redux core.

Maybe we should consider that the right path might be to develop and stabilize a good library on top of Redux (like Jumpstate?). We start by teaching people that, and then give them an easy path to use Redux directly when they need to.

I don't think Redux needs very much more in its core codebase and I don't see any part of it that needs to be abstracted away permanently. (If you do, let me know 😄) In my opinion, there isn't a lot to gain by adding or removing things from Redux core.

Improving a library to the point where it's stable and flexible enough for everyone to use is probably a better option. Like you said, not much of the "boilerplate" is actually required, so let's get rid of it in a library on top of Redux instead of modifying Redux itself.

An example of this happening in another community is in the Rust programming language. There is a non-blocking IO library for the Rust programming language called "mio". It focuses on being small and low-level just like Redux does. The thing is, pretty much no one uses it directly because that would be really hard and full of boilerplate. Most everyone uses another library called tokio which builds on mio and makes it extremely usable and ergonomic. This way, anyone who needs the plumbing from mio can use that directly, but anyone who just wants to make something quickly can use tokio.

We should adopt a similar model.

[markerikson]

To expand on a couple of @sunjay 's comments:

There was a recent comment in #775 that I think captures things well:

Redux is a generic framework that provides a balance of just enough structure and just enough flexibility. As such, it provides a platform for developers to build customized state management for their use-cases, while being able to reuse things like the graphical debugger or middleware.

So yes, Redux is "just a pattern" in a lot of ways. The core library really is feature-complete - the only real semi-planned changes are things like the proposed enhancer restructuring ( #1702, #2214 ), and possibly making combineReducers more flexible ( #1768 , #1792 , etc).

Almost two years have passed since Redux was created, and we now have a pretty good idea how people are using it. As one example, @jimbolla collected a list of all known store enhancers in #2214 , and categorized how they work and what they're used for. I'm still absolutely a huge fan of Redux's simplicity and flexibility, but I'd love to see some still-idiomatic abstractions on top of Redux that would simplify general usage and solve problems for people.

One other set of semi-related topics, and something that I have a distinct personal interest in, are the ideas of "encapsulated logic/components" (per @slorber 's "scalable frontend with Elm/Redux" playground ), and "plug-and-play Redux setup" (as seen in experiments like brianneisler/duxtape#1 , jcoreio/redux-features#7 , etc). Global state and app setup is great for some use cases, but not so much for others.

As an interesting related point, @toranb has done some great work creating an Ember wrapper for Redux at https://github.com/ember-redux/ember-redux . The Ember world is really into "convention over configuration", and so ember-redux sets up a reasonable default store config, including redux-thunk and such. Some kind of approach like that might be helpful.

So yes, I'm sorta throwing out a whole bunch of different thoughts here, but they are related in various ways. Overall, I want to lower the barriers for learning and using Redux, and enable more advanced use cases across the board.

[ntucker]

Redux is a general API, not specialized. This makes it more verbose, while also covering more cases. Its power is in complex software, whereas any new or simple project this is beyond the scope of necessity.

However you can build specializations on top of general APIs. For instance, I use https://github.com/acdlite/redux-actions which reduces boilerplate for common cases. I still use the full power of redux and simply having that interface would not be enough for my needs.

The other problem is with new people who haven't experienced the pain of incredibly complicated applications wondering what's the point. Well, to them they probably shouldn't even use redux until they have experienced that pain, but Dan's egghead series can kick them past this point pretty easily.

https://egghead.io/courses/getting-started-with-redux
https://egghead.io/series/building-react-applications-with-idiomatic-redux

Reference: The spectrum of abstraction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVVNJKv9esE

[Andarist]

As mentioned - redux-actions is quite good at removing some boilerplate, removing constants out of equation by attaching .toString is a really neat idea I like, however I prefer to write this logic myself than to use redux-actions myself, but thats personal choice for keeping my code smaller.

Imho there should be a built-in mechanism (subscribe's callback argument?) for observing dispatched actions stream (i know it can be done in a middleware, but thats quite restricting use case, as it cannot be used outside, i.e. by components or connect)