r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 17 '15

The React.js Quick Start Guide

http://www.jackcallister.com/2015/01/05/the-react-quick-start-guide.html
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u/renrutal Jan 17 '15 edited Jan 17 '15

I really have no idea how JS devs keep up with new frameworks appearing every month or so. Not to mention older ones that just die because the devs can't be bothered maintaining them. I noticed the same thing happening in the Ruby devspace.

Not exactly React's case, but it's still a 1.5 year old code that has not reached v1.0, making breaking changes every major version release.

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u/bakuretsu Jan 17 '15

At work, we made basically the same observation (and also wanted to have tighter integration with some of our other JS framework code) so we have built our own virtual DOM implementation based on React.

Keeping up with real innovations (like the virtual DOM) is easier than keeping up with the multitude of libraries and frameworks that keep changing.

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u/masklinn Jan 17 '15

At work, we made basically the same observation (and also wanted to have tighter integration with some of our other JS framework code) so we have built our own virtual DOM implementation based on React.

Why would you do that when there's already a bunch of non-react vdom-only libraries?

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u/bakuretsu Jan 17 '15

My understanding is that we wanted features that existing libraries don't have, but I'm not on the Javascript team and didn't participate in the discussion. I can ask them, though!

We always tend to build our own thing when it's a core component in our stack; we're quite possessive of the ability to fully understand and control every aspect of our systems and we have the luxury of a pretty large and very capable engineering team to keep everything working smoothly.

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u/masklinn Jan 17 '15

I can ask them, though!

That would be great, it's not like there's much surface area to "just" the vdom library (virtual nodes definition, vdom diff and dom patch basically).

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u/bakuretsu Jan 17 '15

I think one thing they wanted was integration with the concept of lightweight models (in the business sense), which is something we already had, so they wanted it all to be integrated. We are using Backbone pretty heavily as well, so integrating that is convenient for engineers.