Something worth noting is that both Angular and Vue are far more script-embed-di...

madmax108 · on Aug 19, 2017

Perfectly said. I've used Vue for a couple of months now (a couple personal projects, experiments and some dashboards) and used Angular for ~2 years before (admittedly, mostly Angular 1), and have literally never had to start off from 'npm install', unlike react (which I used for a year or so before), where everything needed a lot of boilerplate setup.

Most devs I know start a react application by cloning some standard git repo which has a working webpack/tidyCSS/redux/some test suite etc. and then write your first line of useful code. The boilerplate is enormous!

chrisco255 · on Aug 19, 2017

Most Angular 1 projects I saw would start off with a Yeoman/Bower MEAN stack implementation. The boilerplate no less enormous there. I'll admit Vue is nicer about these things than either Angular or React, but Angular has tons of boiler plate.

kccqzy · on Aug 20, 2017

I've used react without npm at all. Just download the react and reactdom scripts from its official site, put two <script> tags in your HTML and that's it.

chrisco255 · on Aug 19, 2017

Angular 1 is, but Angular 2+ is not at all. Angular's CLI is Webpack based, and leverages NPM for package management.

As for build systems vs. script includes... I think Vue is probably being used in a lot more hobby projects than npm downloads would seem to indicate...but using a build system is a stronger indicator of a professional web app and pretty much necessary for any non-trivial project.

sb8244 · on Aug 19, 2017

I think this would be very likely. For instance, we are still using a bower install of angular due to rails asset pipeline that is committed into repo. Our tens builds per day that would be fetching fresh are not fetching angular for that reason.

bastawhiz · on Aug 19, 2017

A very large number of people use React in the same way, linking to a cdn.

yunyu · on Aug 19, 2017

Could you explain your rationale? I highly doubt that a very large number of people are hand-writing render functions... I personally gave up on React and only picked it up several months later after finding out that using it with just a script embed was exceedingly painful.

jotto · on Aug 19, 2017

  <div id='root'></div>

  <script src='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/15.6.1/react.js'></script>
  <script src='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/15.6.1/react-dom.js'></script>
  <script src='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/babel-core/5.8.38/browser.min.js'></script>

  <script type='text/babel'>
    const App = () => <div>Hello World</div>;
    ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById('root'))
  </script>

bastawhiz · on Aug 20, 2017

A lot of people will have a bundle that they've transpiled, but use the global React object from pulling in React and ReactDOM from a CDN. Other folks will use a library that offers syntax like:

  elem.div(elem(Component, {prop: 'value'}), {className: 'foo'})

It's surprisingly common, and it's listed not too far down on the React installation page:

https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/installation.html

octalmage · on Aug 19, 2017

You can include a babel script that compiles everything on load. There's a performance hit but people do it because it's easy.

Edit: more information: https://github.com/babel/babel-standalone/blob/master/README...

ry_ry · on Aug 20, 2017

Babel-standalone was put together as part of the pretty good reactjs.net .Net implementation of react, after the 'official' version of babel-in-the-browser was killed off.

It's /really/ not intended for use in prod.

.

Edit. I kinda sent off on a stream of conciseness about reactjs.net here, feel free to ignore this bit.... :D

Infact, as well made as it is and despite using reactjs.net heavily for the last couple of years, the only time i would be inclined to use it on a new app is to leverage the universal rendering, or if your react app is just freaking massive and takes forever to run a build - otherwise you may aswell just throw everything at webpack --watch via iisnode or regular 'ole vanilla node.

Then again we had to make a bunch of changes to the package itself to fully support our bundling (we don't like cassette so we made our own) and to support multiple server-side bundles, none of which are agnostic enough to warrant a PR, so upgrading reactjs.net to a more recent version is a hassle, making me slightly biased against using it ;)