Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

Transpiling JSX

If you've ever used CoffeeScript, JSX is similar to that. You can't run CoffeeScript in the browser; you must first transpile it to JavaScript. Or if you've used a CSS preprocessor, such as Sass, JSX is also similar. Sass features such as @include or @extend are not valid CSS, and you must use a preprocessor to transform Sass to CSS. The same is true for JSX;  we must use a transpiler/preprocessor to transform it into plain JavaScript.

For JSX, the most popular transpiler is the Babel transpiler, which we have already used when developing our API. In a way, you can think of JSX in the same way as newer ECMAScript syntax. Some ECMAScript features are not supported in the browser, and therefore we must transpile it down into ...