Why in the world do we need another form library? — A voice in the crowd.
Anything new emerges from the discontent with the present. The motivation for creating React Advanced Form is to challenge the expectations of a developer of what a form solution must do. We felt there are a lot of essentials missing in popular form solutions, and thus we have decided to implement our own.
| React Advanced Form | Another solution | |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Field-centric. Treats any form as a composition of fields. | Form is usually a central point of implementation. |
| Motivation | Focuses on complex use cases, and has more responsibility in favor of maintainable code. | Focuses on simple use cases in favor of being smaller. |
| Validation | Includes smart multi-layer validation. Extendable, composable, pluggable with any third-party validation library. | Doesn't include any validation algorithms. Delegates the logic to a developer. |
| Size | Bigger. Close to no extra code for a scenario of any complexity. | Smaller. Requires extra code for any deviating use case. |
We are transparent about the cost of adding a new dependency to your application. Regardless of possible optimizations, React Advanced Form will most likely remain bigger than any other form solution out there.
Choosing a package is a question of balance between its size and the features you get. A smaller library that requires to write more code to cover basic scenarios has much bigger effect on the size of your application than a heavier one that results into less code on your side.
Please see the minified bundle size comparison with popular form solutions below.
| Package name | Bundle size (minified) |
|---|---|
react-advanced-form |
|
redux-form |
|
formik |
|
final-form |
There are three incrementally complex scenarios implemented using different form solutions to give you an overview of what to expect from React Advanced Form.
{% page-ref page="formik.md" %}
{% page-ref page="final-form.md" %}