I finally paid attention to React when David Nolen wrote a post involving it in December. I have great respect for Nolen’s work, and it made me give the library a look (and I expect many others did the same).
If you haven’t checked it out yet, React is Facebook’s “V in MVC” library. There’s a virtual DOM involved, but when you first glance read about it, it’s putting HTML (actually, XML, if you want to use JSX as they recommend) back into your JavaScript.
What.
That’s exactly the reaction React got 8 months ago when they announced the project at JSConf US.
Really? Facebook React demo advocating storing HTML in your JavaScript. Which is a HUGE step back in terms of maintainability. #jsconf #wtf
— Ben Alman (@cowboy) May 29, 2013
my reaction to the reactions to facebook react: "did you know there is a beach a few hundred feet from where you are sitting?!" #jsconf
— ƒ u ® ƒ (@furf) May 29, 2013
And still some reactions like that today:
Instagram's HTML is interesting: data-reactid=".r[50clr].[0].[1].[0].[0].[0].[0].[0].[0].[1].[0]{frame637683138772228678}.[0]" #wut
— Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) January 20, 2014
However, if you want to learn more about React, I suggest watching the JSConf EU talk (which was about 4-5 months after the US event) about the library. Egghead.io is building out a React Fundamentals series, and I expect to see more coming out in the near future, as the race for getting content to people seems to get faster and faster. On Twitter, it seems like people are using #reactjs as the hashtag, in case you want to poke around at what people are saying now vs. then 🙂