React.JS and what server to use ?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have used Ember.JS a good deal over the past year as well as a little Angular. I found Ember to have some cool concepts and I liked writing mixins in Ember, but something about Ember seems very complex to me and I have felt like I wanted something simpler to work with. I have felt that Rails has been slipping a bit and the popularity of Rails has not been growing as fast as I had once hoped for. Because of that I have had to focus more on JavaScript and JS frameworks.

I watched a video of Jing Chen on the Facebook team explain problems with MVC complexity. I felt like what she was saying made alot of sense and I have heard that React.JS can do alot for a simple library.

I found this post which explains different ways of using React.JS with Rails and Flex. (Flex is the MC in MVC and React is the V), however they all seem to have pros and cons and it is not clear what is the best approach. The third approach seems to be to use two servers, Rails and Node. That does not seem optimal at all.

http://www.openmindedinnovations.com/blogs/3-ways-to-integrate-ruby-on-rails-react-flux

It seems like to use Flex you need to use Node, so it appears if I want to learn more about Flex then I have to possibly focus more on Node as a server …

2

React can run on the server, but it is not mandatory. You can just use it in the browser if you want.

3

Hi Jedrin,

what is wrong with react-rails? You can put ReactJS in vendor folder and use it as you would typically use it in any other web app.

PS. I have no idea what is flex and do not see any issue with MVC.

4

He meant Flux (not Flex), an architecture for React.

I’ve used it and found it much better than MVC, but server rendering is not required.

5

Thanks Andrey! I have not heard about Flux before.