Response to https://twitter.com/fisherwebdev/status/526646648311906304

526646648311906304.markdown

This is a response to Bill Fisher regarding experience with Flux:

@abdullin Also, can you clarify what you mean by "solution structure"? I am thinking about revising the examples soon.

Currently all flux samples (that I've seen) group files into folders based on technical similarity. For example, stores go with stores, action creators reside in the same folder shared with the other action creators.

This pattern works quite well for smaller projects. It feels especially good for the sample projects of various MVC frameworks, when you have just a bunch of controllers, models and views.

However, as we discovered on some production projects, such approach doesn't scale well. At some point you end up with dozens of technically similar files per folder and logically messy solution.

1. Doesn't scale well.
2. While you work on a component, you have to suffer from extra context switching overhead (jumping between various folders).
3. Solutions become more "entangled" than needed.
4. More complex IDE features are needed to support the workflow (e.g. context-aware navigation and completion).
5. More merge conflicts, since it is harder to bound work by a feature (and communicate that).

We discovered that aligning solution with the domain model leads to a better design in the long run. E.g. we try to group files by their functionality or feature. This would mean, that different technical elements of a single feature could be squashed into one folder or onto one file. For example, for Flux we are considering to have a single folder for "News feed", which would contain all related action creators, fetchers and stores. Of course, there could be some other components that the this chat page would use (e.g. avatars, like buttons or user stores), such components would reside in their own folders. On the overall, such component decomposition is requires more effort than simply grouping files by class type. However, we value both the process (it leads to a deeper insight) and the outcome (solution that is more simple to think and reason about).

Of course, this is just something that seems to work only in a subset of cases I've been exposed to. There can easily be a deeper pattern which I fail to recognize.

Hello Bill and Rinat,

I would love to read more enriching discussions like this. I have to admit that since the first time I saw Flux, it was really familiar to DDD & EventSourcing (which is a great concept in my opinion). This is my output for the discussion:

1. Store is something called bounded context in DDD terms, therefore it's quite common to duplicate state between multiple stores
2. Action represents interaction (be that a user's interaction or API callback) with the application and therefore it's something that happened in the past and there should not be any way to reverse it. (Rinat you have already mentioned it)
3. Action naming should always reflect what actually happened rather than expose implementation detail

I wish more developers would be aware of those points before they start using Flux in production, as it would lead to much cleaner design. Flux is really powerful weapon but can harm badly if it's not used properly.