Modern Front-End Development for Rails

Chapter 4React

React has emerged as the most popular of the current JavaScript frameworks. It has a huge user base and a large ecosystem. Structurally, React is the polar opposite of Stimulus. It is more complex, and its design reflects fundamentally different assumptions about how best to manage state and logic in a JavaScript program. Specifically, a React application expects to get data from the server and manages state and HTML by managing the DOM on the client using a custom HTML-generation language called JSX.

For our purposes in this book, we will only use a fraction of React’s capabilities; our focus here will be on using React to support interactivity on a single page while working with our Rails application. We will not focus on using ...