Let’s face it. Reactive programming and the traditional web APIs are not friends. Event handlers, observers, dimensions, all of these things are meant to be used imperatively using callbacks. This doesn’t play so well with reactive programming and can leave our components littered with callbacks and extra state.
For many front-end developers, components have become a central concept in their development workflow. Components provide a robust model for architecting and scaling complex applications, allowing for composition from smaller and simpler encapsulated parts.
Angular is an application framework favored by many in the JavaScript community. Angular provides a library for building encapsulated components, dependency injection, a templating language with data binding, an application router built on observables, and a command line interface that lowers the barrier to entry.
Recently I was fortunate to be able to attend the Google Polymer Summit in Copenhagen with a SitePen colleague. Having attended the PWA Summit last year in Amsterdam we were expecting a well organised and interesting conference, and we were not to be disappointed.
There are many reasons to like React. It provides a nice library for writing reusable components and leverages its own virtual DOM, abstracting away the obtuse native DOM APIs in favor of a simple method calls, which are further abstracted away with a JavaScript language extension, JSX.