The theme of this first round-up of 2014 is integration. I've tried to assemble a list of articles and projects that use React in various environments.

React Baseline #

React is only one-piece of your web application stack. Mark Lussier shared his baseline stack that uses React along with Grunt, Browserify, Bower, Zepto, Director and Sass. This should help you get started using React for a new project.

As I do more projects with ReactJS I started to extract a baseline to use when starting new projects. This is very opinionated and I change my opinion from time to time. This is by no ways perfect and in your opinion most likely wrong :).. which is why I love github

I encourage you to fork, and make it right and submit a pull request!

My current opinion is using tools like Grunt, Browserify, Bower and multiple grunt plugins to get the job done. I also opted for Zepto over jQuery and the Flatiron Project's Director when I need a router. Oh and for the last little bit of tech that makes you mad, I am in the SASS camp when it comes to stylesheets

Check it out on GitHub...

Animal Sounds #

Josh Duck used React in order to build a Windows 8 tablet app. This is a good example of a touch app written in React.

Download the app...

React Rails Tutorial #

Selem Delul bundled the React Tutorial into a rails app. This is a good example on how to get started with a rails project.

git clone https://github.com/necrodome/react-rails-tutorial
cd react-rails-tutorial
bundle install
rake db:migrate
rails s

Then visit http://localhost:3000/app to see the React application that is explained in the React Tutorial. Try opening multiple tabs!

View on GitHub...

Mixing with Backbone #

Eldar Djafarov implemented a mixin to link Backbone models to React state and a small abstraction to write two-way binding on-top.

View code on JSFiddle

Check out the blog post...

React Infinite Scroll #

Guillaume Rivals implemented an InfiniteScroll component. This is a good example of a React component that has a simple yet powerful API.

<InfiniteScroll
  pageStart={0}
  loadMore={loadFunc}
  hasMore={true || false}
  loader={<div className="loader">Loading ...</div>}>
  {items} // <-- This is the "stuff" you want to load
</InfiniteScroll>

Try it out on GitHub!

Web Components Style #

Thomas Aylott implemented an API that looks like Web Components but using React underneath.

View the source on JSFiddle...

React vs Angular #

React is often compared with Angular. Pete Hunt wrote an opinionated post on the subject.

First of all I think it’s important to evaluate technologies on objective rather than subjective features. “It feels nicer” or “it’s cleaner” aren’t valid reasons: performance, modularity, community size and ease of testing / integration with other tools are.

I’ve done a lot of work benchmarking, building apps, and reading the code of Angular to try to come up with a reasonable comparison between their ways of doing things.

Read the full post...

Random Tweet #

With the new year, we thought you'd enjoy some new tools for debugging React code. Today we're releasing the React Developer Tools, an extension to the Chrome Developer Tools. Download them from the Chrome Web Store.

You will get a new tab titled "React" in your Chrome DevTools. This tab shows you a list of the root React Components that are rendered on the page as well as the subcomponents that each root renders.

Selecting a Component in this tab allows you to view and edit its props and state in the panel on the right. In the breadcrumbs at the bottom, you can inspect the selected Component, the Component that created it, the Component that created that one, and so on.

When you inspect a DOM element using the regular Elements tab, you can switch over to the React tab and the corresponding Component will be automatically selected. The Component will also be automatically selected if you have a breakpoint within its render phase. This allows you to step through the render tree and see how one Component affects another one.

We hope these tools will help your team better understand your component hierarchy and track down bugs. We're very excited about this initial launch and appreciate any feedback you may have. As always, we also accept pull requests on GitHub.

Happy holidays! This blog post is a little-late Christmas present for all the React users. Hopefully it will inspire you to write awesome web apps in 2014!

React Touch #

Pete Hunt wrote three demos showing that React can be used to run 60fps native-like experiences on mobile web. A frosted glass effect, an image gallery with 3d animations and an infinite scroll view.

Try out the demos!

Introduction to React #

Stoyan Stefanov talked at Joe Dev On Tech about React. He goes over all the features of the library and ends with a concrete example.

JSX: E4X The Good Parts #

JSX is often compared to the now defunct E4X, Vjeux went over all the E4X features and explained how JSX is different and hopefully doesn't repeat the same mistakes.

E4X (ECMAScript for XML) is a Javascript syntax extension and a runtime to manipulate XML. It was promoted by Mozilla but failed to become mainstream and is now deprecated. JSX was inspired by E4X. In this article, I'm going to go over all the features of E4X and explain the design decisions behind JSX.

Historical Context

E4X has been created in 2002 by John Schneider. This was the golden age of XML where it was being used for everything: data, configuration files, code, interfaces (DOM) ... E4X was first implemented inside of Rhino, a Javascript implementation from Mozilla written in Java.

Continue reading ...

React + Socket.io #

Geert Pasteels made a small experiment with Socket.io. He wrote a very small mixin that synchronizes React state with the server. Just include this mixin to your React component and it is now live!

changeHandler: function (data) {
  if (!_.isEqual(data.state, this.state) && this.path === data.path) {
    this.setState(data.state);
  }
},
componentDidMount: function (root) {
  this.path = utils.nodePath(root);
  socket.on('component-change', this.changeHandler);
},
componentWillUpdate: function (props, state) {
  socket.emit('component-change', { path: this.path, state: state });
},
componentWillUnmount: function () {
  socket.removeListener('component-change', this.change);
}

Check it out on GitHub...

cssobjectify #

Andrey Popp implemented a source transform that takes a CSS file and converts it to JSON. This integrates pretty nicely with React.

/* style.css */
MyComponent {
  font-size: 12px;
  background-color: red;
}

/* myapp.js */
var React = require('react-tools/build/modules/React');
var Styles = require('./styles.css');

var MyComponent = React.createClass({
  render: function() {
    return (
      <div style={Styles.MyComponent}>
        Hello, world!
      </div>
    )
  }
});

Check it out on GitHub...

ngReact #

David Chang working at HasOffer wanted to speed up his Angular app and replaced Angular primitives by React at different layers. When using React naively it is 67% faster, but when combining it with angular's transclusion it is 450% slower.

Rendering this takes 803ms for 10 iterations, hovering around 35 and 55ms for each data reload (that's 67% faster). You'll notice that the first load takes a little longer than successive loads, and the second load REALLY struggles - here, it's 433ms, which is more than half of the total time!

Read the full article...

vim-jsx #

Max Wang made a vim syntax highlighting and indentation plugin for vim.

Syntax highlighting and indenting for JSX. JSX is a JavaScript syntax transformer which translates inline XML document fragments into JavaScript objects. It was developed by Facebook alongside React.

This bundle requires pangloss's vim-javascript syntax highlighting.

Vim support for inline XML in JS is remarkably similar to the same for PHP.

View on GitHub...

Random Tweet #

React got featured on the front-page of Hacker News thanks to the Om library. If you try it out for the first time, take a look at the docs and do not hesitate to ask questions on the Google Group, IRC or Stack Overflow. We are trying our best to help you out!

The Future of Javascript MVC #

David Nolen announced Om, a thin wrapper on-top of React in ClojureScript. It stands out by only using immutable data structures. This unlocks the ability to write a very efficient shouldComponentUpdate and get huge performance improvements on some tasks.

We've known this for some time over here in the ClojureScript corner of the world - all of our collections are immutable and modeled directly on the original Clojure versions written in Java. Modern JavaScript engines have now been tuned to the point that it's no longer uncommon to see collection performance within 2.5X of the Java Virtual Machine.

Wait, wait, wait. What does the performance of persistent data structures have to do with the future of JavaScript MVCs?

A whole lot.

Read the full article...

Scroll Position with React #

Managing the scroll position when new content is inserted is usually very tricky to get right. Vjeux discovered that componentWillUpdate and componentDidUpdate were triggered exactly at the right time to manage the scroll position.

We can check the scroll position before the component has updated with componentWillUpdate and scroll if necessary at componentDidUpdate

componentWillUpdate: function() {
  var node = this.getDOMNode();
  this.shouldScrollBottom =
    (node.scrollTop + node.offsetHeight) === node.scrollHeight;
},
componentDidUpdate: function() {
  if (this.shouldScrollBottom) {
    var node = this.getDOMNode();
    node.scrollTop = node.scrollHeight
  }
},

Check out the blog article...

Lights Out #

React declarative approach is well suited to write games. Cheng Lou wrote the famous Lights Out game in React. It's a good example of use of TransitionGroup to implement animations.

Try it out!

Reactive Table Bookmarklet #

Stoyan Stefanov wrote a bookmarklet to process tables on the internet. It adds a little "pop" button that expands to a full-screen view with sorting, editing and export to csv and json.

Check out the blog post...

MontageJS Tutorial in React #

Ross Allen implemented MontageJS's Reddit tutorial in React. This is a good opportunity to compare the philosophies of the two libraries.

View the source on JSFiddle...

Writing Good React Components #

William Högman Rudenmalm wrote an article on how to write good React components. This is full of good advice.

The idea of dividing software into smaller parts or components is hardly new - It is the essance of good software. The same principles that apply to software in general apply to building React components. That doesn’t mean that writing good React components is just about applying general rules.

The web offers a unique set of challenges, which React offers interesting solutions to. First and foremost among these solutions is the what is called the Mock DOM. Rather than having user code interface with the DOM in a direct fashion, as is the case with most DOM manipulation libraries.

You build a model of how you want the DOM end up like. React then inserts this model into the DOM. This is very useful for updates because React simply compares the model or mock DOM against the actual DOM, and then only updates based on the difference between the two states.

Read the full article ...

Hoodie React TodoMVC #

Sven Lito integrated the React TodoMVC example within an Hoodie web app environment. This should let you get started using Hoodie and React.

hoodie new todomvc -t "hoodiehq/hoodie-react-todomvc"

Check out on GitHub...

JSX Compiler #

Ever wanted to have a quick way to see what a JSX tag would be converted to? Tim Yung made a page for it.

Try it out!

Random Tweet #

I'll start by answering the obvious question:

What happened to 0.6 and 0.7?

It's become increasingly obvious since our launch in May that people want to use React on the server. With the server-side rendering abilities, that's a perfect fit. However using the same copy of React on the server and then packaging it up for the client is surprisingly a harder problem. People have been using our react-tools module which includes React, but when browserifying that ends up packaging all of esprima and some other dependencies that aren't needed on the client. So we wanted to make this whole experience better.

We talked with Jeff Barczewski who was the owner of the react module on npm. He was kind enough to transition ownership to us and release his package under a different name: autoflow. I encourage you to check it out if you're writing a lot of asynchronous code. In order to not break all of react's current users of 0.7.x, we decided to bump our version to 0.8 and skip the issue entirely. We're also including a warning if you use our react module like you would use the previous package.

In order to make the transition to 0.8 for our current users as painless as possible, we decided to make 0.8 primarily a bug fix release on top of 0.5. No public APIs were changed (even if they were already marked as deprecated). We haven't added any of the new features we have in master, though we did take the opportunity to pull in some improvements to internals.

We hope that by releasing react on npm, we will enable a new set of uses that have been otherwise difficult. All feedback is welcome!

Changelog #

React #

• Added support for more attributes:
  • rows & cols for <textarea>
  • defer & async for <script>
  • loop for <audio> & <video>
  • autoCorrect for form fields (a non-standard attribute only supported by mobile WebKit)
• Improved error messages
• Fixed Selection events in IE11
• Added onContextMenu events

React with Addons #

• Fixed bugs with TransitionGroup when children were undefined
• Added support for onTransition

react-tools #

• Upgraded jstransform and esprima-fb

JSXTransformer #

• Added support for use in IE8
• Upgraded browserify, which reduced file size by ~65KB (16KB gzipped)