Hey everyone!
In today's front-end development, facing increasingly complex and diverse application scenarios, it seems we all share a "sweet burden": having to install multiple state management libraries. How many do you typically include in your projects? In my own, I frequently use Jotai, Zustand, React-Query, and sometimes even my own custom publish-subscribe implementations (or event-driven libraries like RxJS and Alien-Signals).
Exploring Each Library's Strengths and Use Cases
Jotai
Jotai is an atomic state management tool. It excels at handling small-scale, component-level state sharing.
For instance, if you need to control the display/hide state of a modal, you can simply export an atom from within the modal component itself and import it wherever needed (or manage it via a proxy pattern). There's no need to lift it to a page-level global state.
While Jotai also offers advanced capabilities like derived state, trying to handle complex page-level state logic with it can lead to disorganized code.
Zustand
Zustand is a versatile and well-balanced state management library. It provides a moderate yet efficient solution for various state management challenges, performing well with global state, local state, and integrations with other React features.
React-Query
React-Query is specifically designed to manage server-side state, and it doubles as an excellent task execution manager. It's tightly integrated with many libraries in the React ecosystem, often being installed as a dependency when you include them. Since it's already there, why not leverage its powerful features?
"Server-side state" is a concept that has gained traction recently, primarily referring to caching API data via hashing. This means you no longer need to write an extra layer of logic, as you might with Zustand, to handle incoming API data. React-Query automatically manages data fetching, caching, updating, and synchronization for you, greatly simplifying the data layer development.
Event-Driven Solutions
Some business logic is inherently event-driven, and managing it solely with React's dependency arrays can become incredibly challenging.
For example, our business's login flow might require not only receiving a JWT Token from SSO (Single Sign-On) but also completing certain tasks before successful entry into the system. This involves two dependencies. If we use useEffect, it might execute the effect function twice, and we'd have to worry about unexpected scenarios, even though it's fundamentally a single "login event" that triggers the logic. Event-driven libraries, on the other hand, offer better decoupling and management for such complex, multi-step event flows.
By selectively combining these different state management tools, we can choose the most suitable solution based on our project's specific needs and scenarios, thereby building clearer and more maintainable front-end applications.
How do you choose and combine these state management libraries in your projects? Does this "blooming" state management ecosystem make your development easier, or do you also feel it's a bit of a "sweet burden"?
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