I’ve been using NgRx for a short while now and I thought I’d write up some of my initial thoughts on it.
Getting started can be tricky, it is a steep learning curve, but once you understand what each part of the framework is for and the underlying approach NgRx is taking a then it’s easy to get going.
One complaint about NgRx is the amount of code you have to write, the number of files you have to generate in order to get something working. For me I don’t think this is such a problem with file is designed to do one thing and one thing only. This separation of concerns makes reading through an NgRx based code base easy to understand. When you open one of these files, a reducer for example, you know exactly what that files role is, what is does and how it works. It’s just concerned with the one thing and shouldn’t have any other unrelated functionality in that file.
With today’s modern editors it makes switching between files so much easier and faster. If you had to use Eclipse to write NgRx you would definitely have a case to complain about the number of files.
One of the things I really like about using NgRx is this prescriptive approach it takes. As a contractor I have to work with a new code base every few months and being able to ‘get up to speed’ with how an application works can take a while. Even though they are all Angular applications, I find that there are 100s of ways an Angular application can be structured, based on the needs of the business or the experience of the developers who have worked on the app.
If an application has a good developer, who thinks about and plans how to write their code, and a business who are concerned with the quality of the product over just getting things done. A applications codevase can be well structured without NgRx, but through using a framework like this means that the code is well written and based on good practices.
So when someone like me starts working on the project I can go through the application and see how data is passed through the app, how actions are being used and when and how the application flows.
So I’m enjoying using NgRx , it definitely has its place, in developing large scale applications, with a team of developers working on the application for other projects NgRx isn’t the best approach, but for a large application it’s a great choice of framework.