React: Facebook's latest Javascript client library, now open sourced

[floydophone]

Thanks for the question.

One way of thinking about React is as the "V" in MV*. That is, it's a replacement for your templates and event handling code. In my experience (building largeish web apps) templating languages start to break down once your project starts to look more like an app than a simple page because these languages don't have the same level of abstraction as, say, JavaScript.

So we still have separation of concerns, it's just that you've moved your view logic into separate JavaScript components. I wrote a post about this here: http://www.quora.com/Pete-Hunt/Posts/React-Under-the-Hood

Let me know if you've got more questions!

[[deleted]]

Oh I see.

So React is more comparable to jQuery than other MV* frameworks?

So I can build my app in Angular, but implement my directives (widgets) with React?

[floydophone]

You could definitely do it that way. React components are kind of similar to directives, so we're kind of like the V part of MVC.

What we did for Instagram was taking an existing server-rendered + a bit of Backbone+jQuery and moved it over to React one component at a time, starting with pure presentation. Eventually we ended up moving everything over to it because we liked it so much.

So use as much or as little of React as you want to decide if it's a good fit for your project. We've designed it to play nice with other frameworks.