ReactJS Workshop

React is without doubt the most exciting JavaScript framework nowadays. It may not yet be the most popular, but its foundations are so strong that even competitors like AngularJS and EmberJS have taken notice and are in the process of adding features that were first popularized by React. It was open sourced by Facebook and Instagram, and in the two years following its announcement, it has gained adoption by many important web sites, including Khan Academy, Airbnb, Hipchat, Netflix, at an ever growing pace.

React is both easy and simple to learn and use. After learning a few core ideas, building complex web interfaces rapidly becomes almost trivial. In this workshop, we will be learning ins and outs of React and at the end of become ready to use React in our existing and new projects. One of the major selling points of React is that it lives happily with existing technologies so that one can transition to React in an existing application piece by piece, rather than committing to it fully and we will see how React makes this easy.

One of the most important reasons React has become popular has been its speed. In this workshop, we will go over this issue and learn about virtual DOM which makes React this fast, but most importantly we will see that speed is actually not the biggest selling point of React. We will argue that speed of development, simplicity and ease of reasoning about code written with it is of utmost importance and we will observe how thinking in terms of isolated components makes building UIs effortless and designer friendly.