Pete Hunt: React - Rethinking Best Practices (updated) - JSConf.Asia 2013

This is amazing stuff, thanks Dan! Hopefully it is the beginning of the end of refresh-driven-development. If you are a web developer (front-end/back-end), and you haven't switched to React yet, take this for a spin, and read "Facebook just taught us all how to build websites" ( [link] ), and watch 'React - Rethinking Best Practices' by Pete Hunt ( [this video] ). The distinction between the back-end and front-end is a product of the complexity introduced by the web with its 'worse is better' mix of badly integrated tools. It made building user interfaces a dark art with all its quirks: - a layouting system that had an active vendetta against humans - Javascript with all its deficiencies - Connascence introduced by Server <-> Client communication (Server Model <-> API View <-> JS Model <-> JS View) - declarative views that were ill-suited for web-apps (logic-less templates, what a lie!) - cross-browser incompatibilities - difficulty in implementing client-side routing - immature developer tooling But worst of them all was DOM mutation and spaghetti code, which was in reality a fundamental deficiency of the development model itself, and not because web developers the world over were being deliberately irresponsible. React is changing all that with the help of ES6. It simplifies web development both in concept and in practice. In a few years, building UIs would be just another part of writing software, and competent Full-Stack developers would cease to remain unicorns. Here are a fe

Pete Hunt addresses this specifically in this React talk starting at 3 minutes: [this video] Basically, the idea is that most JS templating solutions separate technologies (HTML , JS, templating languages), but don't actually separate concerns, because the concern is simply generating and updating DOM regardless of how many technologies you use. Most JavaScript frameworks or libraries that handling generating and updating DOM, like Ember's two-way binding with Handlebars and Angular's dirty checking with directives, don't really separate markup from logic. They just invent a new language to mix with your HTML, and that new language is deliberately made extremely weak.