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Pete Hunt: React: Rethinking best practices -- JSConf EU

JSConf

286K subscribers • 33 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 10 people: 9 on Hacker News and 1 curated list.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2014 to 2022.
  • Presented by Pete Hunt, developer at Facebook
  • Linked in the descriptionSlides on SlideShare
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 13 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

548K views13 years ago10 recommendations

Web developmentSoftware designReactVue, Svelte, Angular and othersSoftware architecture

Pete Hunt introduces React and defends its controversial design decisions, including building views with JavaScript and using a virtual DOM.

Slides: slideshare.net/floydophone/react-preso-v2 React, the new open-source JS library from Facebook and Instagram, is a different way to write JavaScript apps. When it was introduced at JSConf US in May, the audience was shocked by some of its design principles. One sarcastic tweet from an audience member ended up describing React's philosophy quite accurately: twitter.com/cowboy/status/339858717451362304 At Facebook and Instagram, we're trying to push the limits of what's possible on the web with React. My talk will start with a brief introduction to the framework, and then dive into three controversial topics: Throwing out the notion of templates and building views with JavaScript, "re-rendering" your entire application when your data changes, and a lightweight implementation of the DOM and events. License: For reuse of this video under a more permissive license please get in touch with us. The speakers retain the copyright for their performances.

Why it's here

10 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as the classic talk explaining the core philosophy, design decisions, and benefits of React over traditional templates.

Moments people linked to

EdwardMSmithon Hacker News • Recommends

On “How and why we moved to Vue.js”

If you’re not sure of the “why” of react, I’ve found that Pete Hunt’s talk “Rethinking Best Practices” gives a great overview of the reasoning behind react. Especially from about 15:15. link to this video

insinon Hacker News • Recommends

On “What if we'd had better HTML-in-JS syntax all along?”

…was Mochikit.DOM ( link ) By the end of DOMBuilder's life it could generate DOM or HTML from the same code and I'd tried unsuccessfully to implement a way to rehydrate HTML by hooking up events using the same code on the client. Not long after, I happened to be in the audience for Pete Hunt's React: Rethinking best practices talk at JSConf EU ( link to this video ) and I was totally floored; they'd solved everything I had been trying to do with UI as code and much more, and JSX was the icing on the cake, as using nested object/array syntax has always been rife with comma-management hell when you're maintaining UI code.…

programming-talkscurated list on GitHubRecommends

Under “Web Development”

React: Rethinking best practices 00:29:32 by **Pete Hunt** (2013)

versusdotcomon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Angular 2.0”

Totally agree and also recommend to look at React. While Angular is just way too much of everything React is pretty much thought-out: Here a quick comparison of both: link Here a pretty good video of React's founder pointing on some weakness of Angular: link to this video

munroon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Mistakes AngularJS Developers Make”

#1 -- Separating by concerns is much preferable to me, organizing by controllers/directives/services/... is a separation of technology, not the high level concept. There's a great React video on this concept, as well as some other good stuff! 1 1 link to this video

paulshenon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Build with React – ReactJS articles and tutorials”

You're definitely not the only one. link as well as other HN comment threads. Check out link or this JSConf talk link to this video

ChrisGaudreauon Hacker News • Recommends

On “How I learned to stop worrying and love React”

Separation of concerns and separation of technologies are a different thing. It would appear you haven't done your research. See Pete Hunt's famous talk: link to this video

firasdon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Thinking in React”

…omponentizing UIs. After much research and usage of the technologies mentioned above, I found React to provide the best solution.” link 4) Pete Hunt: React: Rethinking best practices (youtube): “building views with JavaScript, ‘re-​rendering’ your entire application when your data changes, and a lightweight implementation of the DOM and events.” link to this video 5) Nothing new in React and Flux except one thing: “What is it that makes React so innovative and compelling?… The Virtual DOM allows us to convert a mutable retained mode graphics API to an immutable functional immediate mode API.” link (I collected them to go along with something I wrote in the same vein: link )…

vmastoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “An experienced Javascript developer’s account of learning React”

…ntion: JSX: Has been argued about so much it's pretty much useless to try and add anything to this discussion at this point honestly. For whomever likes it, fine, for those who don't, thankfully the JavaScript ecosystem provides with a multitude of alternatives. For new-comers still trying to reason about it, this talk by Pete Hunt is a good start link to this video Redux: > Anytime I work with redux I need to go back to its documentation because its core concepts are so complicate that my mind struggles retrieving them back puking them out as soon as I stop working with it. While I agree that working with Redux at scale can be complicated, the core concepts are extremely simple: Async Action -> Action…

yCombLinkson Hacker News • Recommends

On “React I love you, but you're bringing me down”

I actually much prefer how react handles this, I think this very early react talk makes a very good point link to this video

danabramovon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Case for React.js and ClojureScript”

Pete Hunt talks about this in Rethinking Best Practices video1. This is one concern, not two. 1: link to this video

MalcolmDiggson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: Long held tech taboos being broken?”

When React was released it pushed against some long-held (and still widely held) beliefs about separation of concerns, etc. link to this video Years later, it's still a major point of contention, and a bit of a taboo.

kentoron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why we chose Vue.js over React”

Yes and this is a tired argument by now. The talk by Pete Hunt aptly titled "React: Rethinking best practices"0 given in 2013 points out how separating templates and logic is merely a separation of technologies, not concerns. 0: link to this video

DougBTXon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Vue.js: the good, the meh, and the ugly”

…0, it boils down to asking why client side development isn't like like HTML templating. The answer is that updating the entire page DOM on every change is unworkable, there needs to be support for partial updates. That's what React offers, a return to the data -> UI paradigm, without having to write a secondary code path for partial updates. 0 link to this video…

PKopon Hacker News • Mentions

On “React Concurrent Mode”

Rethinking best practices absolutely addressed misapplication of separation of concerns. link to this video Components have always had JSX markup along with data manipulation logic. CSS in JS and styling co-located with component extended this consolidation of cross-cutting concerns. These, along with not manually updating DOM state as you mention, all fall under declarative aspects of React.. which concurrent rendering and Suspense are consistent with and essentially an extension of.

hombre_fatalon Hacker News • Mentions

On “What if we'd had better HTML-in-JS syntax all along?”

Link? You might be misremembering Pete Hunt's talk about React's design decisions: link to this video where he makes the case against the "separation of concerns" cargo cult.