The React Newsletter

The React project at Facebook gained a lot of popularity in the past year, with its to main Github repositories earning a combined 60,000 stars. And while React was initially open-sourced in 2013, it was not until last year, along with the announcement of React Native, that the project's popularity took off.

With its take on declarative user interface building and the excitement of better mobile development experience using React Native, project has lit a fire in the JavaScript community and influenced coding practices by directly challenging established coding practices and conventions. At the center of the project has been Christopher Chedeau, a front-end engineer at Facebook. The Practical Developer had some burning questions about the future of React.

Meteor is working on the 1.3 release and it will be one of the greatest releases ever. It comes with ES2015 module support and direct access to NPM modules.

So, now we can create Meteor apps using NPM modules for both client and server. Most importantly, now this is very easy.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to create a simple React app with Meteor. For the router, I’m using FlowRouter, but you could use React Router instead.

2015 was the year of React with tons of new releases and developer conferences dedicated to the topic all over the world. For a detailed list of the most important milestones of last year, check out our React in 2015 wrap up.

The most interesting question for 2016: How should we write an application and what are the recommended libraries?

The purpose of this cookbook is to guide you into the world of React and Webpack. Both are powerful technologies and when used together, frontend development becomes a joy.

The cookbook should have something to offer for all skill levels. If you are interested in just React, skip the Webpack part and vice versa. A more tutorial oriented approach is available in the form of SurviveJS - Webpack and React book.

React is a library that greatly simplifies component development. Once you understand its basics, you can build your own stack around it. This is in contrast to frameworks, such as Angular, that try to offer everything and a kitchen sink.

The official tutorial is a good starting point if you just want a quick look at the technology.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about React is that it keeps on challenging traditional web development. It allows us to rethink concepts such as separation of concern. It will also influence on mobile development in the form of React Native. React Native allow native level performance while making it possible to develop apps in a tight realtime preview loop using JavaScript.

Webpack operates on a lower level. It is a module bundler. In essence it is something that you use to build your project into deliverable components (HTML, CSS, JS). The nice thing about Webpack is that once you initially configure it, it deals with the nasty details for you. This allows you to mix various technologies within your project without a headache.

If you are completely new to Webpack and want to go through a good introduction, check out Pete Hunt's guide. You'll find the basics there. This guide merely complements his.

Christian Alfoni and Juho Vepsäläinen.
 

I've been using React.js for about 6 months now. In the grand scheme of things that's not very long at all, but in the ever-churning world of JavaScript frameworks, that just about qualifies you as a bearded elder! I've helped out a few people lately with React starter tips, so I thought it would be a good idea to write some of them up here to share more broadly. These are all either things that I wish I'd known when I started out, or things that really helped me 'get' React.

I'm going to assume that you know the absolute basics; if the words component, props, or state are unfamiliar to you, then you might want to read the official Getting started orTutorial pages. I'm also going to use JSX, because it's a much more succinct and expressive syntax for writing components.

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This is the second post in a series of tutorials on React.js. The first one took you through building a very simple profile page with the popular Javascript library