Day 2, and I’ve spent 4 hours this evening just fighting to get ReactJS to compile to ES5. Maybe I can just skip the next 3 days to compensate?
That’s how I feel right now, anyway.
I’m a huge fan of ReactJS and I’ve been desperate to use it on a project for ages. Unfortunately ReactJS and its community are moving so quickly that they haven’t stopped to document things properly and because of how quick it’s changing, any community guides are already outdated.
Tonight consisted of swapping and hacking between various combinations of
grunt, gulp, webpack, browserify, babel and react. I’m still not sure
what the best combination is – nor that any of the above is even required
(seriously why is it so hard to get the default Hello World running using the
suggested method of babel-cli?!)
I’ve finally got everything running with the help of a friendly user in the React IRC channel. But I’m a little dissuaded already.
Sometimes there’s a comfort in being given a strict set of tools, and I wonder if React needs time to settle on a way of pre-compilation. Right now it’s a bit of a minefield.
Anyway after many hours of frustration, I’ve ended up with a combination of:
- gulp
- babel
- babelify
- browserify
- react (+ react-dom)
I’m still getting to grips with what everything is, but it’s a real shame to spend the evening bashing your head against the wall just trying to get some JavaScript to pre-compile.
For now, it’s rendering. So while I have 0 commits, I’m happy enough that tomorrow at least I’ll get to write a line of code (hopefully!) or maybe I’ll distract myself by implementing some of the UI instead.
Today’s Observations
- At the start of this project I decided to test out Atom. I had previously
been using Sublime Text 3 (which I use full time otherwise). My summary:
it’s a great idea and an amazing achievement, but I’m not sure it’s ready
to be used generally. I’ll revisit this editor in the future, but even for
this small side project, it’s not up to the task.
- Stats for today: 0 commits, time spent 4h