[javascript] Why use Redux over Facebook Flux?

I've read this answer, reducing boilerplate, looked at few GitHub examples and even tried redux a little bit (todo apps).

As I understand, official redux doc motivations provide pros comparing to traditional MVC architectures. BUT it doesn't provide an answer to the question:

Why you should use Redux over Facebook Flux?

Is that only a question of programming styles: functional vs non-functional? Or the question is in abilities/dev-tools that follow from redux approach? Maybe scaling? Or testing?

Am I right if I say that redux is a flux for people who come from functional languages?

To answer this question you may compare the complexity of implementation redux's motivation points on flux vs redux.

Here are motivation points from official redux doc motivations:

1. Handling optimistic updates (as I understand, it hardly depends on 5th point. Is it hard to implement it in facebook flux?)
2. Rendering on the server (facebook flux also can do this. Any benefits comparing to redux?)
3. Fetching data before performing route transitions (Why it can't be achieved in facebook flux? What's the benefits?)
4. Hot reload (It's possible with React Hot Reload. Why do we need redux?)
5. Undo/Redo functionality
6. Any other points? Like persisting state...

According to this article: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/a-realworld-comparison-of-front-end-frameworks-with-benchmarks-2019-update-4be0d3c78075

You better use MobX to manage the data in your app to get better performance, not Redux.

From a new react/redux adopter migrating from (a few years of) ExtJS in mid-2018:

After sliding backward down the redux learning curve I had the same question and thought pure flux would be simpler like OP.

I soon saw the benefits of redux over flux as noted in the answers above, and was working it into my first app.

While getting a grip on the boiler plate again, I tried out a few of the other state management libs, the best I found was rematch.

It was much more intuitive then vanilla redux, it cuts out 90% of the boilerplate and cut out 75% of the time I was spending on redux (something I think a library should be doing), I was able to get a couple enterprise apps going right away.

It also runs with the same redux tooling. This is a good article that covers some of the benefits.

So for anyone else who arrived to this SO post searching "simpler redux", I recommend trying it out as a simple alternative to redux with all the benefits and 1/4 of the boilerplate.

You might be best starting with reading this post by Dan Abramov where he discusses various implementations of Flux and their trade-offs at the time he was writing redux: The Evolution of Flux Frameworks

Secondly that motivations page you link to does not really discuss the motivations of Redux so much as the motivations behind Flux (and React). The Three Principles is more Redux specific though still does not deal with the implementation differences from the standard Flux architecture.

Basically, Flux has multiple stores that compute state change in response to UI/API interactions with components and broadcast these changes as events that components can subscribe to. In Redux, there is only one store that every component subscribes to. IMO it feels at least like Redux further simplifies and unifies the flow of data by unifying (or reducing, as Redux would say) the flow of data back to the components - whereas Flux concentrates on unifying the other side of the data flow - view to model.

In Quora, somebody says:

First of all, it is totally possible to write apps with React without Flux.

Also this visual diagram which I've created to show a quick view of both, probably a quick answer for the people who don't want to read the whole explanation:

But if you still interested knowing more, read on.

I believe you should start with pure React, then learn Redux and Flux. After you will have some REAL experience with React, you will see whether Redux is helpful for you or not.

Maybe you will feel that Redux is exactly for your app and maybe you will find out, that Redux is trying to solve a problem you are not really experiencing.

If you start directly with Redux, you may end up with over-engineered code, code harder to maintain and with even more bugs and than without Redux.

From Redux docs:

Motivation
As the requirements for JavaScript single-page applications have become increasingly complicated, our code must manage more state than ever before. This state can include server responses and cached data, as well as locally created data that has not yet been persisted to the server. UI state is also increasing in complexity, as we need to manage active routes, selected tabs, spinners, pagination controls, and so on.

Managing this ever-changing state is hard. If a model can update another model, then a view can update a model, which updates another model, and this, in turn, might cause another view to update. At some point, you no longer understand what happens in your app as you have lost control over the when, why, and how of its state. When a system is opaque and non-deterministic, it's hard to reproduce bugs or add new features.

As if this wasn't bad enough, consider the new requirements becoming common in front-end product development. As developers, we are expected to handle optimistic updates, server-side rendering, fetching data before performing route transitions, and so on. We find ourselves trying to manage a complexity that we have never had to deal with before, and we inevitably ask the question: Is it time to give up? The answer is No.

This complexity is difficult to handle as we're mixing two concepts that are very hard for the human mind to reason about: mutation and asynchronicity. I call them Mentos and Coke. Both can be great when separated, but together they create a mess. Libraries like React attempt to solve this problem in the view layer by removing both asynchrony and direct DOM manipulation. However, managing the state of your data is left up to you. This is where Redux comes in.

Following in the footsteps of Flux, CQRS, and Event Sourcing, Redux attempts to make state mutations predictable by imposing certain restrictions on how and when updates can happen. These restrictions are reflected in the three principles of Redux.

Also from Redux docs:

Core Concepts
Redux itself is very simple.

Imagine your app's state is described as a plain object. For example, the state of a todo app might look like this:

{
  todos: [{
    text: 'Eat food',
    completed: true
  }, {
    text: 'Exercise',
    completed: false
  }],
  visibilityFilter: 'SHOW_COMPLETED'
}

This object is like a "model" except that there are no setters. This is so that different parts of the code can’t change the state arbitrarily, causing hard-to-reproduce bugs.

To change something in the state, you need to dispatch an action. An action is a plain JavaScript object (notice how we don't introduce any magic?) that describes what happened. Here are a few example actions:

{ type: 'ADD_TODO', text: 'Go to swimming pool' }
{ type: 'TOGGLE_TODO', index: 1 }
{ type: 'SET_VISIBILITY_FILTER', filter: 'SHOW_ALL' }

Enforcing that every change is described as an action lets us have a clear understanding of what’s going on in the app. If something changed, we know why it changed. Actions are like breadcrumbs of what has happened. Finally, to tie state and actions together, we write a function called a reducer. Again, nothing magic about it — it's just a function that takes state and action as arguments, and returns the next state of the app. It would be hard to write such a function for a big app, so we write smaller functions managing parts of the state:

function visibilityFilter(state = 'SHOW_ALL', action) {
  if (action.type === 'SET_VISIBILITY_FILTER') {
    return action.filter;
  } else {
    return state;
  }
}

function todos(state = [], action) {
  switch (action.type) {
  case 'ADD_TODO':
    return state.concat([{ text: action.text, completed: false }]);
  case 'TOGGLE_TODO':
    return state.map((todo, index) =>
      action.index === index ?
        { text: todo.text, completed: !todo.completed } :
        todo
   )
  default:
    return state;
  }
}

And we write another reducer that manages the complete state of our app by calling those two reducers for the corresponding state keys:

function todoApp(state = {}, action) {
  return {
    todos: todos(state.todos, action),
    visibilityFilter: visibilityFilter(state.visibilityFilter, action)
  };
}

This is basically the whole idea of Redux. Note that we haven't used any Redux APIs. It comes with a few utilities to facilitate this pattern, but the main idea is that you describe how your state is updated over time in response to action objects, and 90% of the code you write is just plain JavaScript, with no use of Redux itself, its APIs, or any magic.

I worked quite a long time with Flux and now quite a long time using Redux. As Dan pointed out both architectures are not so different. The thing is that Redux makes the things simpler and cleaner. It teaches you a couple of things on top of Flux. Like for example Flux is a perfect example of one-direction data flow. Separation of concerns where we have data, its manipulations and view layer separated. In Redux we have the same things but we also learn about immutability and pure functions.

Here is the simple explanation of Redux over Flux. Redux does not have a dispatcher.It relies on pure functions called reducers. It does not need a dispatcher. Each actions are handled by one or more reducers to update the single store. Since data is immutable, reducers returns a new updated state that updates the store

For more information Flux vs Redux

I'm an early adopter and implemented a mid-large single page application using the Facebook Flux library.

As I'm a little late to the conversation I'll just point out that despite my best hopes Facebook seem to consider their Flux implementation to be a proof of concept and it has never received the attention it deserves.

I'd encourage you to play with it, as it exposes more of the inner working of the Flux architecture which is quite educational, but at the same time it does not provide many of the benefits that libraries like Redux provide (which aren't that important for small projects, but become very valuable for bigger ones).

We have decided that moving forward we will be moving to Redux and I suggest you do the same ;)