Facebook came up with React in March this year, to free iOS/Android developers of the code-upload hassle on Github, allowing them to directly build native iOS or Android apps on Github. Taking a step further, Facebook has today launched the first beta of React.js v0.14, its Javascript library for creating user interfaces.
The announcement coincides with the currently underway, ReactEurope Conference in Paris, the second iteration React conferences started last year. Announcing the Beta, React’s Ben Alpert says,
At our last conference, we released the first beta of React 0.13, and we figured we’d do the same today with our first beta of React 0.14, giving you something to play with if you’re not at the conference or you’re looking for something to do on the way home.
He adds,
We think the true foundations of React are simply ideas of components and elements: being able to describe what you want to render in a declarative way
Alpert further notes, that the team is continuing to let React mature and to make minor changes as the APIs continue to settle down. You can install the new beta with npm install react@0.14.0-beta1 and npm install react-dom@0.14.0-beta1. And as has been mentioned in Deprecating react-tools, Facebook is longer updating the react-tools package so this release doesn’t include a new version of it.
While there are numerous smaller changes, Ben highlighted two major changes in Beta 1 of React.js v0.14. First of them being, splitting up of react.js into two different packages — react and react-dom.
The other big change in this release is exposing refs to DOM components as the DOM node itself. That means: upon looking at what you can do with a ref to a DOM component, Facebook realized that the only useful thing you can do with it is callthis.refs.giraffe.getDOMNode() to get the underlying DOM node. In this release,this.refs.giraffe is the actual DOM node.
This change also applies to the return result of ReactDOM.render when passing a DOM node as the top component. References to custom component classes work exactly as before.
For a more detailed, illustrated documentation of the latest release, you can visitFacebook’s official GitHub blog post here.
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