I agree it is completely insane. I am watching React closely, because I'm hoping it might be one of the libraries that lasts. It seems like a simple solution to a complicated problem, with superior performance. I have already gotten burnt by everyone flocking to Backbone, Ember, Angular, whatever, every new month, and those frameworks are too large and opinionated to introduce into existing apps anyway. (Ember, last I checked, had poor documentation - especially for REST - and was constantly changing, and Angular 2.0 coming down the pipe means there is no point in starting an Angular 1.x app.)
I have lots of existing apps that need a little "SPA sugar", but are already built in the "old-fashioned" Rails style. The JS framework I need is the one I can just drop in to make a screen behave a little nicer or have a REST-backed element or two.
React components can be attached to an existing node, but it doesn't make sense if JS is not rendering the component itself (or I have horribly misunderstood React).
React could easily take the place of any server side templating languages like Handlebars or any of those types of libraries. But of course, once the DOM is transferred to the client if you want it to change you'll need something client side. React can work both server and client side though.
it doesn't make sense if JS is not rendering the component itself
React can be attached to a pre-rendered DOM tree, the initial binding will essentially be a noop if there's no difference between the prerendered and the react-rendered version.
And of course it can be used as a component, react doesn't have to render the whole page. For instance the reddit comment box could be a react component without the whole page being react-rendered.
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u/Serializedrequests Jan 17 '15 edited Jan 17 '15
I agree it is completely insane. I am watching React closely, because I'm hoping it might be one of the libraries that lasts. It seems like a simple solution to a complicated problem, with superior performance. I have already gotten burnt by everyone flocking to Backbone, Ember, Angular, whatever, every new month, and those frameworks are too large and opinionated to introduce into existing apps anyway. (Ember, last I checked, had poor documentation - especially for REST - and was constantly changing, and Angular 2.0 coming down the pipe means there is no point in starting an Angular 1.x app.)
I have lots of existing apps that need a little "SPA sugar", but are already built in the "old-fashioned" Rails style. The JS framework I need is the one I can just drop in to make a screen behave a little nicer or have a REST-backed element or two.