This blog site has been archived. Go to react.dev/blog to see the recent posts.
Since the launch we have received a lot of feedback and are actively working on React 0.4. In the meantime, here are the highlights of this week.
Some quick thoughts on React
Andrew Greig made a blog post that gives a high level description of what React is.
I have been using Facebook’s recently released JavaScript framework called React.js for the last few days and have managed to obtain a rather high level understanding of how it works and formed a good perspective on how it fits in to the entire javascript framework ecosystem.
Basically, React is not an MVC framework. It is not a replacement for Backbone or Knockout or Angular, instead it is designed to work with existing frameworks and help extend their functionality.
It is designed for building big UIs. The type where you have lots of reusable components that are handling events and presenting and changing some backend data. In a traditional MVC app, React fulfils the role of the View. So you would still need to handle the Model and Controller on your own.
I found the best way to utilise React was to pair it with Backbone, with React replacing the Backbone View, or to write your own Model/Data object and have React communicate with that.
Danial Khosravi made a real-time chat application that interacts with the back-end using Socket.IO.
A week ago I was playing with AngularJS and this little chat application which uses socket.io and nodejs for realtime communication. Yesterday I saw a post about ReactJS in EchoJS and started playing with this UI library. After playing a bit with React, I decided to write and chat application using React and I used Bran Ford’s Backend for server side of this little app.
