With companies like Yahoo, AirBnB, Atlassian, and Github embracing React.js, I think it’s safe to say that Facebook has set a new standard in front-end development with this remarkable library. What drew me to React, at first, was its genius approach to rendering. What has kept me using it are things like propTypes, invariant, and the belief that it’s a library’s responsibility to yell at a developer when they are doing something wrong. Continue reading
React is a great new Javascript framework for building fast, dynamic single-page websites. Paired with Flux, you can construct a single page application very quickly. But in a single page application, all of your content is available under a single, unchanging URL. That makes it harder to measure engagement per content, the user cannot easily return to an URL or share it without pointing to the homepage, and interpreting a user’s interaction can be murky if all the URLs are the same. Thus the need for routing within a React.js application. Continue reading
Here at AddThis, we just completed a rewrite of our dashboard using Facebook’s React.js framework and the Flux application architecture. Managing a large Javascript application as its complexity, number of users, and number of developers grows is something that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about during this process. In this post I’ll attempt to distill down some of the lessons we learned along the way and how React.js and Flux can help to address them. Continue reading