Does Redux slow down your development speed?

0
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I've been using Redux for months now and I realized that using Redux actually slows down my dev speed a lot (sorry that the title is provocative). I separated the backend and frontend completely into two repos. I use Rails on the backend and Redux on the frontend.

It feels very nice to be following the modern ES6 trend with React, Redux, and Babel. But these two things bother me:

  1. You have to write a LOT of code just to get CRUD right. Getting the loading state right, making sure that the frontend and backend data are always in sync, etc. is more hassle than you might imagine.
  2. You have to worry about SSR, which is not all that simple.

So I went ahead and re-wrote my app in Rails and React without using Redux. Basically, I just used React to draw presentational components, and Rails controllers replaced Redux's smart containers. Then, I could implement the same functionality twice as fast.

When should I actually use Redux? Am I doing something wrong?

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reactjsredux
This obviously is primarily opinion-based, so it will probably get closed. That said, I personally found MobX to suit me much better than Redux. - robertklep
You are comparing Rails app to a stack with fully separated backend and frontend. I doubt it's really Redux that is slowing you down. - noppa

2 Answers

1
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The major benefit of Redux is the single source of truth for your application's data, paired with powerful features like middlewares (super useful for tracking things like telemetry.)

From a usage POV it's not much more complicated than any other Flux implementation, but you gain the benefit of access to all state all the time instead of cobbling together pubsub subscriptions to a bunch of stores.

I've been using it for about 8 months now and have few complaints.

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When I started using React Native I didn't use redux, I was spending a lot of time sending data from one component to another, from one module to another and the code was getting ugly as my application started growing, until I integrated redux.

Redux allows you to share data across all your application with easy, allowing you to change the global state with a simple action call from your components.

I use Rails as well for the backend but only to save and get data. I have a JSON API that I use from the mobile app (React Native) and from a web app that I have in AngularJS.