Before Redux: The State Management Struggles That Led to Its Creation

Simplified Explanation

Back in the day, managing state in JavaScript applications was messy. For example, if you updated a piece of data, it could trigger multiple events, leading to a chain reaction where many parts of the app updated in unpredictable ways. This made debugging difficult because you couldn't easily trace what caused a particular change.

Why Flux and Redux Were Created

To solve this, Facebook introduced Flux, which organized state updates in a more predictable way. Later, Redux improved upon Flux by enforcing strict rules on how state is changed—always through a single function called a reducer. This made state management much more predictable and easier to debug.

SIde stepping the Royal pain - Prop drilling

Another problem developers faced was sharing state between multiple components. Normally, to share data between components, you had to lift state up to a higher component and then pass it down as props. But this led to prop drilling, where you had to pass data through multiple layers of components, even if some of them didn’t need it.

Redux helped solve this by storing state in a central place (store), which any component could access directly. That’s why Redux became popular in React apps from 2015 to 2017—it made both state updates and state sharing easier.