React for Real

Preface

Many web applications allow users to browse and edit content without reloading the page—for example, editing a document, selecting people to email from a contact list, or even browsing a list of events and buying a ticket. While web pages used to be just about the display of information, now a fair amount of business logic might run in the browser. To handle this logic, you often create specialized code—the data model for your application.

In all these applications, you must update the user interface and data model consistently. Since every web page is a tree of elements, called the DOM, you could apply a change directly to the DOM on every action, but this makes it difficult to distinguish business logic from visual adjustments. When ...