React.js Boilerplate vs Blazejs

Overview

React.js Boilerplate

Stacks402

Followers464

Votes18

Blazejs

Stacks16

Followers11

Votes0

GitHub Stars538

Forks115

React.js Boilerplate vs Blazejs: What are the differences?

Developers describe React.js Boilerplate as "🔥 Quick setup for performance orientated, offline-first React.js apps". Quick setup for new performance orientated, offline–first React.js applications featuring Redux, hot–reloading, PostCSS, react-router, ServiceWorker, AppCache, FontFaceObserver and Mocha. On the other hand, Blazejs is detailed as "*Powerful library for creating user interfaces *". It is a powerful library for creating user interfaces by writing reactive HTML templates. Compared to using a combination of traditional templates and jQuery, it eliminates the need for all the “update logic” in your app that listens for data changes and manipulates the DOM.

React.js Boilerplate and Blazejs can be categorized as "Javascript UI Libraries" tools.

Some of the features offered by React.js Boilerplate are:

Using react-transform-hmr, your changes in the CSS and JS get reflected in the app instantly without refreshing the page. That means that the current application state persists even when you change something in the underlying code! For a very good explanation and demo, watch Dan Abramov himself talking about it at react-europe.
Redux is a much better implementation of a flux–like, unidirectional data flow. Redux makes actions composable, reduces the boilerplate code and makes hot–reloading possible in the first place. For a good overview of redux, check out the talk linked above or the official documentation!
Babel is a modular JavaScript transpiler that helps to use next generation JavaScript and more, like transformation for JSX, hot loading, error catching etc. Babel has a solid ecosystem of offical preset and plugins.

On the other hand, Blazejs provides the following key features:

Create user interfaces
Compiles template files into JavaScript code
Provides a compiler toolchain

React.js Boilerplate and Blazejs are both open source tools. It seems that React.js Boilerplate with 23.2K GitHub stars and 4.69K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Blazejs with 438 GitHub stars and 89 GitHub forks.

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React UI Components

A JavaScript library for building user interfaces

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Advice on React.js Boilerplate, Blazejs

Abigail

Dec 6, 2019

Decided

We chose React on the advice of the Meteor Development Group, which acts as our upstream technical advisors. We had a prior investment in BlazeJS, due to it's optimistic UI, latency compensation, and real-time updates. However, the BlazeJS code wasn't composable and didn't lead to good reuse, as it was already overly abstracted. It also carried with it a lot of baggage from the default HTML DOM. We have enjoyed React's functional components, deterministic rendering, testability, composability, and widespread support. It's taken some time to get used to, but fits in very well with a functional programming style. We had also taken a look at AngularJS components, but they were always half-baked in comparison to the active React community.

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Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

React was a very contentious decision among the Meteor community. We started off with Blazejs, which itself was based off of Handlebars. We liked the HTML-like syntax of Blaze and how nurses, doctors, and other clinicians could become familiar with it. However, the code wasn't very reusable and it was neither modular nor composeable nor testable, and became a major headache to maintain. React solves the problems of composeability and reusability and testing isolation, at the price of having worked the problem backwards and having wound up with a quirky syntax that runs within Javascript that looks similar to HTML but isn't. Nonetheless, React is quickly become a classic example of functional programming techniques, what with its' pure components. All in all, an enjoyable technology to work with that brings some sanity to front-end user interfaces.

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Detailed Comparison

React.js Boilerplate	Blazejs
Quick setup for new performance orientated, offline–first React.js applications featuring Redux, hot–reloading, PostCSS, react-router, ServiceWorker, AppCache, FontFaceObserver and Mocha.	It is a powerful library for creating user interfaces by writing reactive HTML templates. Compared to using a combination of traditional templates and jQuery, it eliminates the need for all the “update logic” in your app that listens for data changes and manipulates the DOM.
Using react-transform-hmr, your changes in the CSS and JS get reflected in the app instantly without refreshing the page. That means that the current application state persists even when you change something in the underlying code! For a very good explanation and demo, watch Dan Abramov himself talking about it at react-europe.;Redux is a much better implementation of a flux–like, unidirectional data flow. Redux makes actions composable, reduces the boilerplate code and makes hot–reloading possible in the first place. For a good overview of redux, check out the talk linked above or the official documentation!;Babel is a modular JavaScript transpiler that helps to use next generation JavaScript and more, like transformation for JSX, hot loading, error catching etc. Babel has a solid ecosystem of offical preset and plugins.;PostCSS is like Sass, but modular and capable of much more. PostCSS is, in essence, just a wrapper for plugins which exposes an easy to use, but very powerful API. While it is possible to replicate Sass features with PostCSS, PostCSS has an ecosystem of amazing plugins with functionalities Sass cannot even dream about having. See this talk for a short introduction to PostCSS.;Unit tests should be an important part of every web application developers toolchain. Mocha checks your application is working exactly how it should without you lifting a single finger. Congratulations, you just won a First Class ticket to world domination, fasten your seat belt please!;react-router is used for routing in this boilerplate. Using the new, and currently unreleased, 1.0 version, react-router makes routing really easy to do and takes care of a lot of the work. Since the version is not officially out yet, the documentation is not fully finished, but by far finished enough to work for most needs.;ServiceWorker and AppCache make it possible to use your application offline. As soon as the website has been opened once, it is cached and available without a network connection. See this talk for an explanation of the ServiceWorker used in this boilerplate. manifest.json is specifically for Chrome on Android. Users can add the website to the homescreen and use it like a native app!	Create user interfaces ;Compiles template files into JavaScript code ; Provides a compiler toolchain
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 538
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 115
Stacks 402	Stacks 16
Followers 464	Followers 11
Votes 18	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 4 Nice tooling 4 Amazing developer experience 3 Easy offline first applications 3 Great documentation 3 Easy setup	No community feedback yet
Integrations
React Mocha React Router Redux PostCSS	JavaScript Zepto jQuery HTML5

What are some alternatives to React.js Boilerplate, Blazejs?

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

React

Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.

Famo.us

Famo.us is a free and open source JavaScript platform for building mobile apps and desktop experiences. What makes Famo.us unique is its JavaScript rendering engine and 3D physics engine that gives developers the power and tools to build native quality apps and animations using pure JavaScript.

Riot

Riot brings custom tags to all browsers. Think React + Polymer but with enjoyable syntax and a small learning curve.

Marko

Marko is a really fast and lightweight HTML-based templating engine that compiles templates to readable Node.js-compatible JavaScript modules, and it works on the server and in the browser. It supports streaming, async rendering and custom tags.