Great write up @serkandurusoy! One more important link for all React newcomers:
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Thank you for the wrap-up Serkan. Next question is: Blaze or React. 
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Oh yeah, that’s a good one! 
Next question is: Blaze or React.
Well, I think jsx kind of helps organizing code, no more back and forth html and javascript, I like being abel to see and work with them together. And IDE (I use Webstorm) autocompletion is so much better with JSX.
And although Blaze/Spacebars is fully capable of components and containers, it is just second nature to it. With React, the paradigm is what the whole thing is built upon.
I also like that React is just javascript and does not introduce any new DSL notation to learn. You know Javascript? Cool, then you know React! It is just like any other library out there.
But then, the “package ecosystem” is what can tip the scale here. With Atmosphere and especially autoform/tabular, I find Blaze more powerful in certain type of apps, namely “Line of Business” apps. But @tomRedox is doing a great job pushing React forward on that front.
Finally, Blaze/spacebars is easier to grasp for beginners and designers.
And although there’s a lot of hype around how much React is superior to Blaze, I don’t think it has merit to the kinds and sophistication levels of the apps that newcomers/designers will be developing.
And Blaze/React can live together as well. So unless we are squeezing milliseconds out of app response times, there’s not much argument against it either.
So, the final word would be, whichever one you find easier to learn and grasp, use that one. You won’t have made a mistake. At least, you won’t have made a mistake that actually matters to your usecase.
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Thanks for the great write up and the links you listed!
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Great write-up, Serkand! I also recommend looking at Udemy courses too, they’ve helped me quite a bit. Stephen Grider’s courses are excellent, he’s very good at explaining very technical things.
For those interested, check out my Meteor 1.3 + React boilerplate which contains a very heavily commented example app which serves as a learning resource. I plan on updating it in the near future.
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Thanks for the mention Serkand. I got more content for everyone coming soon
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For those interested, check out my Meteor 1.3 + React boilerplate2 which contains a very heavily commented example app which serves as a learning resource. I plan on updating it in the near future.
Yes I indeed attest to the comment-quality for that boilerplate. It is almost a document/tutorial by itself!
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I started work on a replacement for Tabular: https://github.com/meteor-utilities/Meteor-Griddle
I haven’t had much time to update it recently but maybe it can serve as a starting point?
For forms there’s https://github.com/nicolaslopezj/meteor-react-form
Although personally I ended up building my own Autoform-like solution in the form of a very lightweight wrapper around Formsy:
And finally, the last piece of the puzzle, user accounts:
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Meteor Griddle looks like it may be able to solve my datagrid issues! Anything worth mentioning? Like any shortcomings, problems, gotchas?
I also wonder what your “autoform-like” solultion looks like. Could you elaborate?
As for accounts, I had never used an accounts ui package, not even in Blaze. I find using the raw accounts api more liberating in terms of custom configurations.
Update: @timbrandin’s tracker-component is quickly growing on me as my choice of meteor-data-integration.
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Not really shortcomings, it’s more that I haven’t tested it with the latest 1.3 release, and there’s a couple pending issues.
And here’s my autoform-like solution (although I’ve decided to move it back inside Telescope from now on):
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@sacha - see the following (I submitted a small pull request a little bit ago to get it working with 1.3). Thanks for putting the package together!
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Hmm very straight forward indeed! Thank you for sharing this.
I too was using formsy until it appears that it’s been abandoned. I’m now using react-redux-form and really like it.
@hwillson thanks for the PR! I’ve added you to the repo in case you ever want to pitch in more
@serkandurusoy Formsy seemed like the most popular form library for React, I didn’t know it had been abandoned. Redux-Form does seem interesting, I just haven’t really dived into Redux yet and I’m not sure if it makes sense to only use it for forms if your app itself is not Redux’d?
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I’ve found multiple complex forms a total pain in React. Sure, you can manage the field values with React state, but when it comes to tracking various other state data (is this field touched? Focused? Valid? If it’s required, is it filled out? etc etc)? Redux really helps with this, I’ve found, as well as managing the rest of my UI state.
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What is this heresy!
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