Build Composable UI Components for Large Scale Applications

React.js is the breakthrough UI Framework from Facebook that is used to build composable UI components for large scale applications.

It was about time that the Facebook and Instagram teams shared their experience in building large scale web applications with the larger community. More precisely, shared the lessons they learned in production. This is the year of Facebook releasing its own dog food to the developer community in the form of a declarative, highly composable JavaScript UI framework called React.js. The most fascinating aspect of React.js is that at its core it is designed to react to underlying data changes and is aware enough to update only the changed parts. This idea is powerful for large scale applications with frequent data changes.

To get started, you can download the React.js framework starter kit from here. Once you have downloaded the framework you can start using the resources to create your React.js UI using any of your favorite editors, such as Sublime Text  or Notepad++. The framework uses the concept of virtual DOM diff for high performance and optionally supports a new XML notation for creating JS objects using HTML syntax (JSX). The first step in using the React.js framework in your application is to provide a reference to the react.js file in your HTML5 UI.

JSX is a clean way of separating a template from the display logic. While it is not required, it keeps the UI component look clean. At its core, React.js uses the render function to perform the DOM mutation. You need to reference the JSX transform libraries if you want to use the declarative JSX syntax.

Now you can use the JSX syntax to write code in React DOM. You can write the React code inside your HTML template as shown here or in a separate JS file.

The React code to transform the getTransformed div will look like:

 var Transformed = React.createClass({    render: function() {        return 
I am {this.props.name}
;    }});React.render(, document. getElementById('getTransformed'));

You can practice writing React code in JSFiddle here and see the UI get transformed in the console.