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A (Brief) History of Redux

Published on October 21, 2024

I've been looking into Redux lately, and its history is pretty interesting. I wanna jot down the main points here.

  • 2011: JS MVC Frameworks
    • MVC: AngularJS, Ember, and Backbone
    • Hard to predicte
  • 2014: Flux
    • Flux
      • all the state update logic would be semi-centralized
      • predictable
    • announced this "Flux Architecture" concept around 2014, didn't provide a full library that implemented that pattern. That led the React community to build dozens of Flux-inspired libraries with variations on the pattern.
  • 2015: The Birth of Redux
    • Redux: Flux + functional programming principles
    • The idea was to demonstrate "time-travel debugging" for a conference talk
    • React only had its legacy Context API, which had was basically broken: it couldn't properly pass updated values down
    • boilerplate
  • 2017: Ecosystem Competition
    • new React Context API
    • Redux wasn't nearly as "required" as it used to be
  • 2019: Redux Toolkit
    • Today, RTK is the standard way to write Redux logic. Like all tools, it has tradeoffs. RTK is probably going to be a bit more code to use than Zustand, but it also provides useful patterns for separating app logic from the UI.

https://redux.js.org/understanding/history-and-design/history-of-redux