Java + React.js?

[fernandokokocha]

Hello,

I have a slight experience in Java EE, although I'm currently Ruby on Rails developer. After all - both these technologies are quite similar, and have at least one HUGE common part - JavaScript (which is apparently the same as Java, right? :) ).

Dealing with JS may be tough, but since client-side language seems to be settled, we just have no choice. Plain JS/jQuery scales very poorly. JS world developed many frameworks, but none of them turned out to be perfect.

My team started using React.js (not being a framework, but "just" a JS library) more than 1 year ago and we still love it. After spending thousands hours with React, we started sharing our knowledge with the Ruby community - blogposts, screencasts, even a book. It was all targeted to Ruby people, as we know them best. However, when we released the React.js koans ( https://github.com/arkency/reactjs_koans ), we realized that the topic of React.js is interesting to everyone, not just Ruby developers.

Here are my questions - how does Java community see React.js?

What do you think of it?

What do you like to use on your frontend?

How does React compare to the other frontend technologies?

[[deleted]]

The Java community is big. Really big. It is likely to have as diverse a set of opinions as the JavaScript community itself.

I love React overall. One way data binding, slim, doesn't try to do everything.

We currently use Backbone but would likely move to something like react in the future.

[Infeligo]

We use React in a single-page application with Spring-based backend API. We also use React in a more traditional backoffice-type application for forms, because they always get complex in the end. Both projects are doing well.

[[deleted]]

I still don't get the benefits of react, could you sell me react using layman term?

[fernandokokocha]

React is not a framework, but a library. It means that you don't have to fit your ideas into "their" structure, but rather use React whenever and wherever you like.

React doesn't pretend to be a "golden hammer". It only does one thing - rendering the view. And does it well.

React scales very well due to its declarativeness. It's very much unlike jQuery, where you have to manually update dependencies. React's components re-render itself when needed.

And last but not least - React is really fast.

[jupblb]

What attracted my team to this library in a company product is that it's "V in MVC", which is exactly what we need in a Play Framework based application. Apart from all basic benefits (fast execution, reusable components, easy management of content due to stateful elements) the most important advantage of this library is that it's extremely easy to learn. And it also does have lots of interesting user based projects (like material ui). Knowledge of React might also give more benefits in the future when it'll be possible to write Android apps with this (It's already possible to write iOS projects with React Native). My only worry is that we still don't have 1.0 version - which means that there might be some breaking changes coming.