I wrote an answer on SO recently that describes some reasons for using Redux, which I'll paste here:
[quote]
Off the top of my head, a few advantages:
- A lot of the time your app's state tree could be considerably different than the UI tree
- Many components may need to access the same state and display it in different ways
- Hot reloading components will wipe out your existing component tree, including any state stored inside of them. Keeping the state separate from the UI tree allows the UI tree to be swapped out and reloaded with the updated components, while keeping your current development state the same.
And that's before getting to many of the commonly discussed benefits, such as predictable state updates, time travel debugging, improved testability, and centralized logic.
It's certainly true that you can write an entire application using nothing but React's component state (and Dan Abramov himself says that people often jump into Redux too early), but from my perspective Redux is absolutely worth it.
[/quote]
As for the switch statements: many of the patterns for Redux usage boil down to "serializability", which is a big deal because it enables scenarios like time travel debugging, persistence of app state, and more. I wrote some thoughts on that topic yesterday, at https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/518qdr/anyone_have... .
FYI, I maintain a big list of links to high-quality tutorials on React, Redux, and related topics, at https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links . You may want to read through some of the Redux tutorials to get a better grasp on how it works and how the pieces fit together.
I wrote an answer on SO recently that describes some reasons for using Redux, which I'll paste here:
[quote]
Off the top of my head, a few advantages:
- A lot of the time your app's state tree could be considerably different than the UI tree
- Many components may need to access the same state and display it in different ways
- Hot reloading components will wipe out your existing component tree, including any state stored inside of them. Keeping the state separate from the UI tree allows the UI tree to be swapped out and reloaded with the updated components, while keeping your current development state the same.
And that's before getting to many of the commonly discussed benefits, such as predictable state updates, time travel debugging, improved testability, and centralized logic.
It's certainly true that you can write an entire application using nothing but React's component state (and Dan Abramov himself says that people often jump into Redux too early), but from my perspective Redux is absolutely worth it.
[/quote]
As for the switch statements: many of the patterns for Redux usage boil down to "serializability", which is a big deal because it enables scenarios like time travel debugging, persistence of app state, and more. I wrote some thoughts on that topic yesterday, at https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/518qdr/anyone_have... .
FYI, I maintain a big list of links to high-quality tutorials on React, Redux, and related topics, at https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links . You may want to read through some of the Redux tutorials to get a better grasp on how it works and how the pieces fit together.