downshift

So Dragtastic came out of my own difficulty finding a React drag and drop library that was both easy to setup and easily extensible. Dragula was one that I looked at during that process. I only briefly looked into Dragula, so I can't say that I have a full breadth of knowledge about the differences, but from what I can tell the overall paradigm is somewhat different. Where some DND libraries attempt to abstract most of the rendering away from you as the developer, dragtastic uses the "function-as-child" rendering method to allow the developer full control over the rendering of their components. It's similar in a way to how Kent Dodd's Downshift library operates https://github.com/paypal/downshift. Essentially Dragtastic manages all the events and state required for cross-browser drag and drop interactions, but instead of rendering your co

The app I'm mentioning was pre-Webpack days, like 4-5 years ago. Just using KnockoutJS...which has no dependencies. It made me realize that tools can dramatically impact my output as a developer. Dependencies can sometimes be a pain in the ass to manage...but they are a huge net positive for productivity. When the choice is between downloading a battle-tested autocomplete package written and maintained by someone like PayPal (https://github.com/paypal/downshift) and rolling your own thing...it's a no brainer. You use the battle tested lib unless you have a very good reason to roll your own thing. Some tools fade, some tools stand the test of time. AngularJS has been deprecated even by its own creators (who built a shiny new framework with the same name)...so that's a bad example.