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RefluxJS

29
23
+ 1
5
Stimulus

116
97
+ 1
16
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RefluxJS vs Stimulus: What are the differences?

Developers describe RefluxJS as "A simple library for uni-directional dataflow application architecture inspired by ReactJS Flux". The goal of the refluxjs project is to get this architecture easily up and running in your web application, both client-side or server-side. On the other hand, Stimulus is detailed as "A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have, by Basecamp". Stimulus is a JavaScript framework with modest ambitions. It doesn't seek to take over your entire front-end—in fact, it's not concerned with rendering HTML at all.

RefluxJS and Stimulus can be categorized as "Javascript UI Libraries" tools.

"Easy to understand" is the top reason why over 4 developers like RefluxJS, while over 2 developers mention "Simple and easy to start with" as the leading cause for choosing Stimulus.

RefluxJS and Stimulus are both open source tools. Stimulus with 7.36K GitHub stars and 181 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than RefluxJS with 5.43K GitHub stars and 352 GitHub forks.

Decisions about RefluxJS and Stimulus
Hampton Catlin
VP of Engineering at Rent The Runway · | 7 upvotes · 418.1K views

Starting a new company in 2020, with a whole new stack, is a really interesting opportunity for me to look back over the last 20 years of my career with web software and make the right decision for my company.

And, I went with the most radical decision– which is to ignore "sexy" / "hype" technologies almost entirely, and go back to a stack that I first used over 15 years ago.

For my purposes, we are building a video streaming platform, where I wanted rapid customer-facing feature development, high testability, simple scaling, and ease of hiring great, experienced talent. To be clear, our web platform is NOT responsible for handling the actual bits and bytes of the video itself, that's an entirely different stack. It simply needs to manage the business rules and the customers experience of the video content.

I reviewed a lot of different technologies, but none of them seemed to fit the bill as well as Rails did! The hype train had long left the station with Rails, and the community is a little more sparse than it was previously. And, to be honest, Ruby was the language that was easiest for developers, but I find that most languages out there have adopted many of it's innovations for ease of use – or at least corrected their own.

Even with all of that, Rails still seems like the best framework for developing web applications that are no more complex than they need to be. And that's key to me, because it's very easy to go use React and Redux and GraphQL and a whole host of AWS Lamba's to power my blog... but you simply don't actually NEED that.

There are two choices I made in our stack that were new for me personally, and very different than what I would have chosen even 5 years ago.

1) Postgres - I decided to switch from MySql to Postgres for this project. I wanted to use UUID's instead of numeric primary keys, and knew I'd have a couple places where better JSON/object support would be key. Mysql remains far more popular, but almost every developer I respect has switched and preferred Postgres with a strong passion. It's not "sexy" but it's considered "better".

2) Stimulus.js - This was definitely the biggest and wildest choice to make. Stimulus is a Javascript framework by my old friend Sam Stephenson (Prototype.js, rbenv, turbolinks) and DHH, and it is a sort of radical declaration that your Javascript in the browser can be both powerful and modern AND simple. It leans heavily on the belief that HTML-is-good and that data-* attributes are good. It focuses on the actions and interactions and not on the rendering aspects. It took me a while to wrap my head around, and I still have to remind myself, that server-side-HTML is how you solve many problems with this stack, and avoid trying to re-render things just in the browser. So far, I'm happy with this choice, but it is definitely a radical departure from the current trends.

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Pros of RefluxJS
Pros of Stimulus
  • 5
    Easy to understand
  • 5
    No Javascript on Backend
  • 5
    Simple and easy to start with
  • 4
    Balance between Front End and BackEnd
  • 2
    Easy way to add functionality to rails views

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Cons of RefluxJS
Cons of Stimulus
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 2
      Steep learning curve

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    What is RefluxJS?

    The goal of the refluxjs project is to get this architecture easily up and running in your web application, both client-side or server-side.

    What is Stimulus?

    Stimulus is a JavaScript framework with modest ambitions. It doesn't seek to take over your entire front-end—in fact, it's not concerned with rendering HTML at all.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use RefluxJS?
    What companies use Stimulus?
    See which teams inside your own company are using RefluxJS or Stimulus.
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    What tools integrate with RefluxJS?
    What tools integrate with Stimulus?
      No integrations found

      Blog Posts

      What are some alternatives to RefluxJS and Stimulus?
      jQuery
      jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.
      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.
      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.
      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.
      See all alternatives