Went to a refresh cleveland event tonight, ReactJS: A hands on introduction. We worked on a simple contact list application tutorial created by the speaker. It was a nice simple introduction to React JS and ES6. I paired with someone, and we made it about halfway through. I will have to look at it in more depth later.
React JS is a view library for javascript that uses virtual DOM diffing with the real DOM to increase rendering performance. It also uses JSX to combine templates with view controller logic. I have been interested in it for a while but never really played with it where I got to actually use it. This was in part because I was most interested in server-side rendering with it and couldn’t get that to work, and because it requires some transpiling to use it in browsers when using JSX.
This was also my first time really using ES6. I’ve been reading a lot about it. Some of it looks interesting, but it also requires transpiling to work in many browsers. Some of it can be cool, but also foreign and hard to parse for someone new to it. I’ve thought it would be cool to write in ES6, transpile to ES5 and ES3, and then use mustard cutting to determine which to serve. It’s hard to figure out how to transpile to ES3 though, and that would significantly complicate my workflow. It doesn’t seem to offer quite enough to be worth it for me.