The next time you share a photo on Imgur, read the latest news about your favorite sports team on Bleacher Report, use Airbnb to find a place to crash on your vacation, buy a ticket to a play or concert on SeatGeek, or check out your news aggregated by Feedly, note that the JavaScript framework running in the background of all of these sites is React! Facebook software engineer Jordan Walke first created this open-source JavaScript library in 2011. His goal was to build simple user interfaces for apps. When Pete Hunt, a member of the development team, was interviewed by InfoWorld, he stated that React(along with Meteor and Angular) is an example of “reactive programming” (hence the name of the program).

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“When your data updates, your UI is automatically updated to reflect that, and the system manages that for you,” Hunt explained. “The difference with React is the way that you program it is much more like a game engine, effectively what happens is the screen is cleared at the beginning of every frame, and then you redraw the scene.”

Mozilla developer James Long reports that React is exceptionally useful for two reasons: it provides the best solutions for data binding, and it excels at components using UIs (user interfaces). React is known for quickly and effectively reflecting changes to settings and notifications. React gave developers a “sneak peek” at version 0.14 back in July, and hopes to go public with it soon!

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