Johannes Lumpe - Developing a Redux Edge

We would like to the thank the following technical reviewers for their early feedback and careful critiques.

Mark Erikson is a Redux expert. He wrote the official FAQ page for the Redux docs, and was given commit access to the Redux Github org as a result. Mark has assisted with answering questions and managing the docs.

Erik Rasmussen is known to the Redux community for his react-redux-universal-hot-example repo, for creating the Ducks specification, and for creating the very popular Redux Form library. He has been using Redux since its invention, even before Dans 2015 React Europe talk.

Sven Anders Robbestad is a a front-end consultant currently working for Acando in Norway. He has been working with JavaScript since it was introduced in the mid-90s and has worked for a number of large corporations in Norway since then. He has also given talks on JavaScript and front-end development in Norway and abroad and has published a book on writing ReactJS applications.

Simen Bekkhus has been a front-end developer for 3.5 years, and has worked on projects using Backbone, where he stood for the migration to React and Redux, and in his new job, on an universal React and Redux app. He actively contributed to OSS, especially geared towards Webpack and Redux.

Michael Baldwin is a software engineer currently building an application with Redux at a startup called Notion AI. He is a recent graduate from Grand Valley State University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

As web technologies have matured, web applications have become more complex and feature rich, pushing the boundaries of whats possible. These feature-rich web applications come at a cost, and that cost is complexity. A large piece of that complexity is the management of application state.

Managing this complexity and the extra state required to enable these rich features is hard. Traditionally, we have used two-way data binding to manage state, allowing state to be automatically updated by binding it to the view layer. This is the approach a lot of frameworks took in the early days of web applications, and its still in use today.

This works out fine for smaller applications, but has proven to be difficult as the complexity of web applications have increased, often resulting in opaque systems where data flow and state changes are non-deterministic and hard to debug. As more features are implemented into these troublesome architectures, the issue is compounded, creating a vicious circle.

Part of this complexity is a result of mixing state mutation and asynchronicity, two concepts that are inherently difficult to understand. In Redux circles this problem is referred to as Mentos and Coke. The point being that these concepts can be unpredictable and messy when mixed.