A (Brief) History of Redux

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.