Redux Alternatives

Introduction To Redux Alternatives

Redux is a JavaScript library which is open-source. It is used for managing application state. Redux is used most of the time with other javascript libraries like React and Angular to build user interfaces. Redux can be understood as a state management tool. Even though it is most commonly used with React, it is suitable for any JavaScript framework or its library. It is very lightweight measuring only 2KB. For any JavaScript-based application app, state management becomes messy when the app size increases or app gets more complex and thus we need a state management tool such as Redux to maintain these states.

Redux is a great tool and its importance is evident with the fact that it has changed the architecture of front-end apps completely. Redux could be a great tool to master for somebody looking for a new job because it provides some interesting offers with various versions of Angular and others. React & Redux combination is particularly important for job prospects.

What is Redux?

The working principle of Redux is quite simple and straightforward. Redux can be considered as a central store which holds the entire state of the application. Each of its components can access the given stored state without requiring sending down property from one component to another.

There are three building blocks of redux: actions, store, and reducers.

1. Actions

This is nothing but events. They are the way to send data from application to Redux store. The data comes from user interactions or API calls or form submission.

2. Reducers

These are nothing but pure functions which after taking the current state of the application, perform the given action and then returns a new state. These states are later stored as objects and they also specify how the state of the selected application changes with the response from an action sent to the store.

3. Store

The store which is the core of the design holds the application state. There can be only one store in any Redux application. One can access the state stored and update its state, and then register or unregister listeners through the available helper methods.

Redux is great but there are some problems with using Redux:

• Difficulty in switching to work with reducers: – To be able to work with redux, one needs to care about functional programming principles and always return a new value based on previous app state. Sometimes this could be easy such as handling simple string or objects or simple array operations but as the complexity of task increases, the better idea would probably be to use Immutable.json from the similar library.
• Don’t Repeat Yourself or DRY principle: – Working with Redux requires keeping some conventions, such as creating actions types or action creators and also reducers. For similar logic sake such as CRUD operations, Redux code may actually look very similar. Adding small functionality in such cases will need adding a lot of redux logic and tests cases. Thus, a better idea would be to think about refactoring or following a DRY rule.
• Care about performances: – In the end, what really matters is performance. Developers usually prefer to have is a single source of truth which is not only easy in maintenance but also debug and test, and hence redux does not suit that. In Redux, even a small change can trigger changes in the DOM structure.

List of Redux Alternatives

Following are the main alternatives for Redux which are as follows:

1. MobX

This is a new library which provides a lot of solutions for above-mentioned problems. It works on 3 points and they are state, derivations, and actions. With MobX, synchronization between models and UI can be done automatically. With MobX, one can use OOP and some methods directly on models’ item. Objects normalization is also not required but in Redux store it is needed.

2. GraphQL

Relay & GraphQL stack is actually comparatively old, but not as popular as Redux. It is developed by Facebook and when it came it was described as the framework to build data-driven react applications. There are many unique benefits of using Relay with GraphQL. The biggest among them is that there is no need to remember from frontend perspective about how to fetch data to get the required response.

3. Jumpsuit

This is a solution usually for someone, who does not want to use MobX, but pure Redux is also not appealing to him/her. A jumpsuit is a framework which is based on Redux and it makes the flow more automatic. For someone who does not like to build an application from scratch (which means adding and configuring many packages), then Jumpsuit is suitable for them. It gives a simplified API layer for both React and Redux.

4. Helpers/generators with conventional redux.js

One of the biggest problems that can be recognized with Redux app is that it has lots of code duplications i.e. it does not follow DRY principle. Conventional-redux.js is the approach to follow in this regard to simplify your workflow.

Jumpsuit, Conventional-redux.js, and many other such tools focus to improve Redux workflow. These are preferred choice for those who are familiar with Redux and understand its ins and outs., These are those people who probably have prepared a lot of data or state logic stuff and don’t really want to rewrite this again and again or has put more effort in learning these skills.

On the other hand, MobX and Relay & GraphQL are outside of Redux stack. MobX is very easy to learn. This is recommended if someone wants to write from scratch very quickly. GraphQL, on the contrary, needs a lot of time to be able to build backend data flow logic. But once it is done, building fronted implementation becomes much easier.

Comparison Table of Redux Alternatives

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