react-tools

React

React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

• Declarative: React uses a declarative paradigm that makes it easier to reason about your application.
• Efficient: React computes the minimal set of changes necessary to keep your DOM up-to-date.
• Flexible: React works with the libraries and frameworks that you already know.

Learn how to use React in your own project.

Examples

We have several examples on the website. Here is the first one to get you started:

/** @jsx React.DOM */
var HelloMessage = React.createClass({
  render: function() {
    return <div>{'Hello ' + this.props.name}</div>;
  }
});

React.renderComponent(
  <HelloMessage name="John" />,
  document.getElementById('container')
);

This example will render "Hello John" into a container on the page.

You'll notice that we used an XML-like syntax; we call it JSX. JSX is not required to use React, but it makes code more readable, and writing it feels like writing HTML. A simple transform is included with React that allows converting JSX into native JavaScript for browsers to digest.

Installation

The fastest way to get started is to serve JavaScript from the CDN (also available on CDNJS):

<!-- The core React library -->
<script src="http://fb.me/react-0.5.0.js"></script>
<!-- In-browser JSX transformer, remove when pre-compiling JSX. -->
<script src="http://fb.me/JSXTransformer-0.5.0.js"></script>

We've also built a starter kit which might be useful if this is your first time using React. It includes a webpage with an example of using React with live code.

If you'd like to use bower, it's as easy as:

bower install --save react

Contribute

The main purpose of this repository is to continue to evolve React core, making it faster and easier to use. If you're interested in helping with that, then keep reading. If you're not interested in helping right now that's ok too :) Any feedback you have about using React would be greatly appreciated.

Building Your Copy of React

The process to build react.js is built entirely on top of node.js, using many libraries you may already be familiar with.

Prerequisites

• You have node installed at v0.10.0+ (it might work at lower versions, we just haven't tested).
• You are familiar with npm and know whether or not you need to use sudo when installing packages globally.
• You are familiar with git.

Build

Once you have the repository cloned, building a copy of react.js is really easy.

# grunt-cli is needed by grunt; you might have this installed already
npm install -g grunt-cli
npm install
grunt build

At this point, you should now have a build/ directory populated with everything you need to use React. The examples should all work.

Grunt

We use grunt to automate many tasks. Run grunt -h to see a mostly complete listing. The important ones to know:

# Create test build & run tests with PhantomJS
grunt test
# Lint the core library code with JSHint
grunt lint
# Lint package code
grunt lint:package
# Wipe out build directory
grunt clean

More…

There's only so much we can cram in here. To read more about the community and guidelines for submitting pull requests, please read the Contributing document.

Changelog

0.5.0 (October 16, 2013)

React

• Memory usage improvements - reduced allocations in core which will help with GC pauses
• Performance improvements - in addition to speeding things up, we made some tweaks to stay out of slow path code in V8 and Nitro.
• Standardized prop -> DOM attribute process. This previously resulting in additional type checking and overhead as well as confusing cases for users. Now we will always convert your value to a string before inserting it into the DOM.
• Support for Selection events.
• Support for Composition events.
• Support for additional DOM properties (charSet, content, form, httpEquiv, rowSpan, autoCapitalize).
• Support for additional SVG properties (rx, ry).
• Support for using getInitialState and getDefaultProps in mixins.
• Support mounting into iframes.
• Bug fixes for controlled form components.
• Bug fixes for SVG element creation.
• Added React.version.
• Added React.isValidClass - Used to determine if a value is a valid component constructor.
• Removed React.autoBind - This was deprecated in v0.4 and now properly removed.
• Renamed React.unmountAndReleaseReactRootNode to React.unmountComponentAtNode.
• Began laying down work for refined performance analysis.
• Better support for server-side rendering - react-page has helped improve the stability for server-side rendering.
• Made it possible to use React in environments enforcing a strict Content Security Policy. This also makes it possible to use React to build Chrome extensions.

React with Addons (New!)

• Introduced a separate build with several "addons" which we think can help improve the React experience. We plan to deprecate this in the long-term, instead shipping each as standalone pieces. Read more in the docs.

JSX

• No longer transform class to className as part of the transform! This is a breaking change - if you were using class, you must change this to className or your components will be visually broken.
• Added warnings to the in-browser transformer to make it clear it is not intended for production use.
• Improved compatibility for Windows
• Improved support for maintaining line numbers when transforming.