Tuxedo.js – A Framework Built on React and Flux

http://www.tuxedojs.org/

by drabinowitz • 12 years ago

168 79 12 years ago

tuxedojs.org

moe• 12 years ago

The javascript community seems to live by the motto "A framework a day keeps the doctor away".

Is anyone keeping count, we must be in the hundreds by now?

wtetzner• 12 years ago

I think it's probably a good thing for now. People are still trying to figure out how to do frontend programming well. Eventually one/a few good models will come out of the chaos, and some frameworks implementing them will start to stabilize. Of course, I have no idea how long that will take.

callahad• 12 years ago

I feel like the Ruby webdev community had a similar ethos, but I dropped out of that scene before things really coalesced. Can anyone comment on how things are playing out there?

watty• 12 years ago

hundreds? I'd be surprised if we hadn't reached a thousand.

nkozyra• 12 years ago

I think this is because creating a Javascript framework is easier than creating a framework in other languages - clientside or otherwise.

Note: I didn't say making a good framework was easy, just making one at all.

Sometimes people just decide to experiment, to try something and then as they grow with it they think it's big enough to share. When a whole bunch of people do that, you end up where we are with JS frameworks.

I'm in the "it's no big deal" group. Are there thousands of frameworks? Yes. Have I heard of more than 5 of them being used extensively? No. The good ones are embraced by developers and shared. The other ones are mocked into oblivion. It's the natural order of things.

Gigablah• 12 years ago

The other ones are mocked into oblivion

This should not be the "natural order" of things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767

aidos• 12 years ago

OT I haven't looked at the lib yet (will do soon) and I know this is going to seem like a silly compliant but - on mobile the content of that page keeps moving around underneath me. It's incredibly frustrating!

drabinowitz3• 12 years ago

Yeah I apologize for that we are still working on a mobile friendly version of the site.

solids• 12 years ago

Please, stop this framework madness.

bringking2• 12 years ago

Does Tuxedo have a plan for Isomorphic applications? I have been following the Yahoo fluxible project since it provides nice abstractions, but was designed for isomorphic apps out of the box.

drabinowitz3• 12 years ago

Currently we have been focusing on a purely client side implementation, that being said our features are largely built to extend React and Flux and that should put us in a strong position to work with Isomorphic apps down the line.

goatslacker3• 12 years ago

You should check out alt[1] and iso[2] which is isomorphic out of the box and it's pure flux. There are examples in both repos.

[1] https://github.com/goatslacker/alt [2] https://github.com/goatslacker/iso

bringking2• 12 years ago

Thanks, those look great. Good work. Looks a little leaner than fluxible as well, which is always a plus

Lazare• 11 years ago

Coincidentally, I was just searching for a good Flux implementation for my first flux-style app, and something about alt really looks good. I think I'll give it a whirl. :)

fro2• 12 years ago

Why is there is a five second animation to load a completely static home page?

bonif• 12 years ago

because HTML is not sexy anymore... We're reinventing the old Flash (skip intro) web sites of the 90s, again ;-(

nacs• 12 years ago

The "Feature" section (with links labeled "Graceful Degradation", "Semantic Action Creation", etc) are all 404s since they're missing the 'http://'.

The Graceful degradation link, for example, goes to http://www.tuxedojs.org/www.tuxedojs.org/docs/TuxModularity instead of http://www.tuxedojs.org/docs/TuxModularity.

drabinowitz3• 12 years ago

Thanks so much for letting us know we will take a look first chance we get.

sjfstebbins2• 12 years ago

Thank you. We have made this adjustment.

emsy• 12 years ago

I never miss downvoting, but all the "not another framework!" Posts make me do so. It's not the framework creators fault that JavaScript is flooded with libraries, so give the framework the chance to prove itself. For JavaScript frameworks, it's survival of the fittest.

woah2• 12 years ago

Better than some of the stagnant languages out there. If people don't want to try any of these new frameworks, they should just keep using what they were using before. Strange to complain about there being too much enthusiasm and innovation in a community.

mattgreenrocks2• 12 years ago

Actually, those 'stagnant' languages are powering your OS, your browser, the backend server, etc. They've had millions of dollars invested into them for development, implementation, and optimization. Doesn't mean they're good, but more that they're [usually] good enough that you can completely ignore them. Talk about abstraction!

Anyway, lots of frameworks coming out != progress. Similarly, lack of new frameworks != stagnation. It often implies maturity, especially if the language has undergone a previous period of hype.

Good tech stays around. Everything else dies by the wayside. Easier to just sit back and see who's left standing a year later. React looks desirable in my eyes because it isn't a framework with a God complex (aka all 'opinionated' frameworks).

fro2• 12 years ago

+1. There is literally zero negative impact on anyone's life by a hundred new js frameworks coming out every day. Ignore them. Use the ones you know and enjoy. If a new one seems to be gaining mainstream traction, spend an hour to check it out. Don't waste a second of brain activity or get annoyed with new frameworks - there is no reason.

gasping• 12 years ago

Yes there is. It becomes harder to separate the wheat from the chaff.

RussianCow2• 12 years ago

Of course there is! It fragments the community, which means instead of pouring our efforts into making one really awesome framework (e.g. Ruby on Rails), every other developer is making their own.

Not that I think that's inherently bad, especially since web technology is constantly in flux, but you can't say that having tons of small frameworks has zero impact on anyone's life.

darylteo• 12 years ago

You're forgetting the people who are new and coming in. Having a hundred options to choose from leads to initial paralysis.

shinzui• 12 years ago

The "Revolutionary App Architecture" looks like a big red flag. Also, that's the first time I've seen a scrum master credited for an open source project.

thoman232• 12 years ago

Also, they misspelled "dependencies". :)

riobard3• 12 years ago

Seriously? Your solution to showing syntax highlighted code snippets is images???

riobard3• 12 years ago

Downvoters, I'd like to hear your arguments of why my complaint is invalid.

jdlshore• 12 years ago

It's not the complaint itself, it's that it's rude, lazy, and off-topic.

davidlumley• 12 years ago

The index is missing some content on Safari thanks to an error (OS X, 8.0.2, private browsing enabled):

InvalidCharacterError: DOM Exception 5: An invalid or illegal character was specified, such as in an XML name.

Seems like an useful combination, but doesn't make me feel great when it's got an error on a mainstream browser.

cheerazar• 12 years ago

Looks to be fixed now. Thank you for alerting us to the issue!

lopatin• 12 years ago

It would take something truly novel to make me consider anything on top of the simple and powerful setup which is react + a custom flux. I don't see much here except some glue that reduces flux boilerplate for actions. It also seems to be a replacement for a simple mixin that subscribes components to stores. The animations feature doesn't seem to be too different than the standard CSSTransitionGroup. The docs say that the Tuxx abstracts away the "complexity" of flux but I don't buy it.

ryanatkn• 12 years ago

Same. Flux is really simple and most of the implementations just remove some boilerplate and add some conventions. Given more time there might be a framework that has everything that I want, informed by comprehensive, mature, real-world use cases, but I haven't yet seen anything compelling enough in the dozen or so libraries I've looked at. I've found a lot of value in having granular control so I can explore different conventions and optimizations.

cnp• 12 years ago

I'm in the same boat. I absolutely love that React + Flux is "just javascript", essentially. It's as simple as it gets.

jstoiko• 12 years ago

I just spent the past 5 days (re-)evaluating javascript frameworks for a project. It does feel like there are (too) many choices. However, I wonder: why are so many of these frameworks so opinionated?

e.g. in Tuxxedo, why would 'actions' be named 'add', 'remove', 'edit' or 'get'. Why not following CRUD or POST/DELETE/PUT/GET convention? That's just one example.

It feels like the front-end developer community tends to over-engineer things these days.

UberMouse• 12 years ago

Those actions can be named whatever you want. The person who wrote the code that appears in the documentation just went with those names, they're completely up to you, the developer.

sjfstebbins2• 12 years ago

We provided opinionated components, but almost all of them are customizable. Actions, animations etc.. can all be changed. We allow you to use our default component names or adjust them to your liking. This ability to adjust defaults follows throughout Tuxx. Check out the documentation for more.

bsimpson• 12 years ago

Did they rename `context` as `nearestOwnerProps`? Why?

thomasloh• 12 years ago

yet another React + Flux "framework". The truth is, a lot of companies who are using React and Flux already have a framework in place, they just didn't polish it to put it out there. Nothing ground-breaking here, certainly nothing revolutionary.

andybak3• 12 years ago

To all the 'oh noes - another framework people' - there's a pattern here. We're going through a transition that isn't complete.

(I might have the details wrong but here's the flavour)

Backbone was a good start - Ember and later angular offered to fulfil a genuine need but after a long period of bedding in, many people have become dissatisfied with them.

React (and a few similar frameworks that appeared around thw same time) turned everyone's head and seemed to offer a much better way forward. However it was only part of the jigsaw. It can be described as the V in MVC with some suggestions on the right way to add the M and C ('Flux').

So - what we're seeing now is a lot of people who've had time to digest React+Flux and are releasing a complete MVC package that incorporates all the lessons learnt. Consider how long we had the "just use jQuery" phase of front-end development. It's just time for pendulum to swing back the other way.

weego• 12 years ago

Those lessons appear to have left us needing a loading screen to show a web page. I'll stick with not bolting everything I can find together into a Frankensteins monster of a stack.

RussianCow2• 12 years ago

To be fair, a loading screen in a web app is a symptom of a bad design, not the use of a framework. For instance, you can use React from Node.js to pre-render the app's initial state.

goatslacker3• 12 years ago

It doesn't have to be that way. These lessons are no substitute for server side rendering although with more frameworks supporting isomorphism out of the box this will hopefully be a thing of the past.

andybak3• 12 years ago

Sorry - you've conflated two things:

"When building complex front-end apps frameworks help."

doesn't imply:

"Everything on the web should pretend it's an app"

My sweet-spot is is pjax, progressive enhancement and "let's pretend some people have javascript turned off so we can maintain a sane architecture without having to explain why"...

But - some things that run in a browser ARE apps and need some support beyond jQuery et al.

norswap• 12 years ago

Frameworks are most often a bad idea. Use libraries instead.

Sometimes they are useful though. For instance, they make sense when routing. But in those cases, they should more like libraries as well: more lightweight. Something like Express or Koa.js but more lightweight.

sebastianconcpt• 12 years ago

People learn using frameworks and discover using libraries.

Some are pioneering-friendly others just-doing-the-job-friendly.

Nothing static, all oscillating in a big Cambrian Explosion of JavaScript creativity

morley• 12 years ago

Frameworks are most often a bad idea. Use libraries instead.

People say this a lot, and it makes me wonder if they've ever worked on a team working on the same codebase. And if they do, what secret sauce they're drinking to not go insane.

In my experience, when people on a team use libraries at their whim, the coding styles diverge wildly from feature to feature. One person decides they're going to write all their AJAX callbacks in an anonymous function; another likes to reference a function directly; another likes to both; and yet another uses promises.

And as soon as someone needs to fix someone else's project, they do some combination of (a) getting wildly frustrated with this other coding style, (b) rewire their mental model to adapt to this new style, (c) spend a week rewriting it in their own style, (d) introduce a ton of bugs in the process, or (e) by some miracle, get it to work perfectly.

So to combat this, the team works out coding standards and a style guide. You must tab with two spaces! You must pass a real Javascript function to your callbacks! You must separate your state from your view!

And of course, once your style guide is big enough, lo and behold: you have your own hand-rolled framework. And hopefully it's tight enough that everyone writes in the same style, but is still expressive, and is still simple enough for a new team member to learn quickly.

So if you're just starting a codebase, it makes complete sense to pick a framework on the outset because people have already gone through that headache for you.

lhorie• 12 years ago

I recall reading about this idea of "exponential creativity". I don't remember if that was the actual term used in the article, but it was basically this idea that given a problem, you can incrementally come up with better solutions (e.g. add 9's to the end of a number to make it bigger), or you can take a leap out of that box and come up with a new class of solutions that completely outdo the old way of doing things (e.g. Knuth's arrow notation, busy beaver).

One could argue that the arms race between Prototype, Dojo, YUI etc from the last decade was a race of incremental solutions and one-upmanship, and jQuery largely stood out from the crowd by having extremely well thought out developer ergonomics.

I think that the ideas behind React/Mithril/Mercury (composability, unidirectionality, etc) are, as jQuery UX was at the time, a "leap out of the box" in the frameworks' arms race, but I feel that frameworks like tuxedo are again settling into the territory of being merely stabs at incremental improvements.

The main problem I see here is that it's not particularly obvious what kind of problem this framework solves. Virtual DOM frameworks are hot because they help solve problems. In contrast, it's hard to sell features.

mattgreenrocks2• 12 years ago

The big problem is that OSS market rewards bloated frameworks/high commit rate/hype over careful, minimal design. Devs are unable to separate hype from technical excellence. I'm not sure many developers even skim the code of their favorite frameworks. Essentially, they're selecting OSS based on the exact same criteria used by the enterprise companies:

* "I'll go with Angular since it's supported by Google"

* "When I'm not sure which library to use, I just choose the one with the most commits"

* "I'll just choose something with the most features in case I need them"

The upshot is that incremental, monolithic solutions get selected over and over because they're easiest to digest and usually supported by a well-known entity with lots of capital (lol meritocracy).

Ultimately, OSS is a poor vehicle for R&D because the market is every bit as dysfunctional and short-term-gain-seeking as the real market. Very strange.

vog2• 12 years ago

to digest React+Flux and are releasing a complete MVC package that incorporates all the lessons learnt

I'd reduce this to "some lessons learnt".

While some people build frameworks based on React+Flux, other poeple still think these frameworks are larger than they should be, and provide even more lightweight alternatives, such as Riot.js.

Nevertheless, I agree that this is still in progress. There are phases of trying entirely new designs, pushing them to their limits, reducing them to their essence, using them as building blocks for new designs, and so on.

riffraff• 12 years ago

unless of course it's just the CADT model all over again.

hmans• 12 years ago

Please stop.

intrasight• 12 years ago

Twenty thousand lines of code to make a todo list - congrads. And crashes Emacs when opened due to that last line being tens of thousands of characters long.

nilliams4• 12 years ago

What are you referring to?

tycho01• 12 years ago

TuxxTodoApp has its JS 'compiled' into the bundle.js, that apparently somehow reached 20k lines.

Interestingly, the user-written code (around 175 lines) appears to make for less lines than the Angular one. It seems that doesn't happen much, so to me that plus this using React makes it seem notable.

Then again, Tuxx using FB's React + Flux without otherwise having affiliation with FB may raise questions about how well FB (React/Flux) will play with them in the future...

boomlinde2• 12 years ago

The site doesn't work and the error console is filled with javascript errors and 404s.

mwillmott• 12 years ago

I'm generally in favour of people releasing more frameworks and showing off work like this. We're not being forced to use it and at the very least it allows us to see and understand other peoples thinking and approaches to new concepts like Flux.

With Marty.js posted the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923053) and, having spent a while looking at that, i'm interested to know if the motivations for creating the two are broadly the same? Are they taking similar approaches or are there fundamental (or subtle) differences? This is something i'm struggling to understand so would appreciate other input.

daemonk• 12 years ago

All these frameworks to do MVC... Maybe it's time browsers just natively support 2 way binding of data to DOM elements and virtual DOM diff-style batch rendering. It seems silly to relegate these features that everyone wants to a 3rd party library.

Tuxedo.js – A Framework Built on React and Flux

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