Today we're happy to announce the initial release of PyReact, which makes it easier to use React and JSX in your Python applications. It's designed to provide an API to transform your JSX files into JavaScript, as well as provide access to the latest React source files.

Usage #

Transform your JSX files via the provided jsx module:

from react import jsx

# For multiple paths, use the JSXTransformer class.
transformer = jsx.JSXTransformer()
for jsx_path, js_path in my_paths:
    transformer.transform(jsx_path, js_path)

# For a single file, you can use a shortcut method.
jsx.transform('path/to/input/file.jsx', 'path/to/output/file.js')

For full paths to React files, use the source module:

from react import source

# path_for raises IOError if the file doesn't exist.
react_js = source.path_for('react.min.js')

Django #

PyReact includes a JSX compiler for django-pipeline. Add it to your project's pipeline settings like this:

PIPELINE_COMPILERS = (
  'react.utils.pipeline.JSXCompiler',
)

Installation #

PyReact is hosted on PyPI, and can be installed with pip:

$ pip install PyReact

Alternatively, add it into your requirements file:

PyReact==0.1.1

Dependencies: PyReact uses PyExecJS to execute the bundled React code, which requires that a JS runtime environment is installed on your machine. We don't explicitly set a dependency on a runtime environment; Mac OS X comes bundled with one. If you're on a different platform, we recommend PyV8.

For the initial release, we've only tested on Python 2.7. Look out for support for Python 3 in the future, and if you see anything that can be improved, we welcome your contributions!

This is the first Community Round-up where none of the items are from Facebook/Instagram employees. It's great to see the adoption of React growing.

React Game Tutorial #

Caleb Cassel wrote a step-by-step tutorial about making a small game. It covers JSX, State and Events, Embedded Components and Integration with Backbone.

Reactify #

Andrey Popp created a Browserify helper to compile JSX files.

Browserify v2 transform for text/jsx. Basic usage is:

% browserify -t reactify main.jsx

reactify transform activates for files with either .jsx extension or /** @jsx React.DOM */ pragma as a first line for any .js file.

Check it out on Github...

React Integration with Este #

Daniel Steigerwald is now using React within Este, which is a development stack for web apps in CoffeeScript that are statically typed using the Closure Library.

este.demos.react.todoApp = este.react.create (`/** @lends {React.ReactComponent.prototype} */`)
  render: ->
    @div [
      este.demos.react.todoList 'items': @state['items']
      if @state['items'].length
        @p "#{@state['items'].length} items."
      @form 'onSubmit': @onFormSubmit, [
        @input
          'onChange': @onChange
          'value': @state['text']
          'autoFocus': true
          'ref': 'textInput'
        @button "Add ##{@state['items'].length + 1}"
      ]
    ]

Check it out on Github...

React Stylus Boilerplate #

Zaim Bakar shared his boilerplate to get started with Stylus CSS processor.

This is my boilerplate React project using Grunt as the build tool, and Stylus as my CSS preprocessor.

• Very minimal HTML boilerplate
• Uses Stylus, with nib included
• Uses two build targets:
  • grunt build to compile JSX and Stylus into a development build
  • grunt dist to minify and optimize the development build for production

Check it out on Github...

WebFUI #

Conrad Barski, author of the popular book Land of Lisp, wants to use React for his ClojureScript library called WebFUI.

I'm the author of "Land of Lisp" and I love your framework. I built a somewhat similar framework a year ago WebFUI aimed at ClojureScript. My framework also uses global event delegates, a global "render" function, DOM reconciliation, etc just like react.js. (Of course these ideas all have been floating around the ether for ages, always great to see more people building on them.)

Your implementation is more robust, and so I think the next point release of webfui will simply delegate all the "hard work" to react.js and will only focus on the areas where it adds value (enabling purely functional UI programming in clojurescript, and some other stuff related to streamlining event handling)

Read the full post...

Today we're releasing a gem to make it easier to use React and JSX in Ruby on Rails applications: react-rails.

This gem has 2 primary purposes:

1. To package react.js in a way that's easy to use and easy to update.
2. To allow you to write JSX without an external build step to transform that into JS.

Packaging react.js #

To make react.js available for use client-side, simply add react to your manifest, and declare the variant you'd like to use in your environment. When you use :production, the minified and optimized react.min.js will be used instead of the development version. For example:

# config/environments/development.rb

MyApp::Application.configure do
  config.react.variant = :development
  # use :production in production.rb
end

// app/assets/javascript/application.js

//= require react

Writing JSX #

When you name your file with myfile.js.jsx, react-rails will automatically try to transform that file. For the time being, we still require that you include the docblock at the beginning of the file. For example, this file will get transformed on request.

/** @jsx React.DOM */
React.renderComponent(<MyComponent/>, document.getElementById('example'))

Asset Pipeline #

react-rails takes advantage of the asset pipeline that was introduced in Rails 3.1. A very important part of that pipeline is the assets:precompile Rake task. react-rails will ensure that your JSX files will be transformed into regular JS before all of your assets are minified and packaged.

Installation #

Installation follows the same process you're familiar with. You can install it globally with gem install react-rails, though we suggest you add the dependency to your Gemfile directly.

React v0.4.1 is a small update, mostly containing correctness fixes. Some code has been restructured internally but those changes do not impact any of our public APIs.

React #

• setState callbacks are now executed in the scope of your component.
• click events now work on Mobile Safari.
• Prevent a potential error in event handling if Object.prototype is extended.
• Don't set DOM attributes to the string "undefined" on update when previously defined.
• Improved support for <iframe> attributes.
• Added checksums to detect and correct cases where server-side rendering markup mismatches what React expects client-side.

JSXTransformer #

• Improved environment detection so it can be run in a non-browser environment.

Download it now!

We launched the React Facebook Page along with the React v0.4 launch. 700 people already liked it to get updated on the project :)

Cross-browser onChange #

Ben Alpert from Khan Academy worked on a cross-browser implementation of onChange event that landed in v0.4. He wrote a blog post explaining the various browser quirks he had to deal with.

First off, what is the input event? If you have an <input> element and want to receive events whenever the value changes, the most obvious thing to do is to listen to the change event. Unfortunately, change fires only after the text field is defocused, rather than on each keystroke. The next obvious choice is the keyup event, which is triggered whenever a key is released. Unfortunately, keyup doesn't catch input that doesn't involve the keyboard (e.g., pasting from the clipboard using the mouse) and only fires once if a key is held down, rather than once per inserted character.

Both keydown and keypress do fire repeatedly when a key is held down, but both fire immediately before the value changes, so to read the new value you have to defer the handler to the next event loop using setTimeout(fn, 0) or similar, which slows down your app. Of course, like keyup, neither keydown nor keypress fires for non-keyboard input events, and all three can fire in cases where the value doesn't change at all (such as when pressing the arrow keys).

Read the full post...

React Samples #

Learning a new library is always easier when you have working examples you can play with. jwh put many of them on his react-samples Github repo.

Some simple examples with Facebook's React framework

• Bootstrap action bar, modal and table #1, #2, #3, #4
• Comments #1, #2
• Data Table #1, #2, #3, #4, #5
• Filter Bar #1, #2, #3, #4, #5
• Fundoo Rating #1
• Line Char: #1, #2
• Multi tabs #1
• Select #1
• Simple Tabs #1, #2, #3, #4
• Toggle #1

React Chosen Wrapper #

Cheng Lou wrote a wrapper for the Chosen input library called react-chosen. It took just 25 lines to be able to use jQuery component as a React one.

React.renderComponent(
  <Chosen noResultsText="No result" value="Harvest" onChange={doSomething}>
    <option value="Facebook">Facebook</option>
    <option value="Harvest">Harvest</option>
  </Chosen>
, document.getElementById('example'));

JSX and ES6 Template Strings #

Domenic Denicola wrote a slide deck about the great applications of ES6 features and one slide shows how we could use Template Strings to compile JSX at run-time without the need for a pre-processing phase.

React Presentation #

Tom Occhino and Jordan Walke, React developers, did a presentation of React at Facebook Seattle's office. Check out the first 25 minutes for the presentation and the remaining 45 for a Q&A. I highly recommend you watching this video.

Docs #

Pete Hunt rewrote the entirety of the docs for v0.4. The goal was to add more explanation about why we built React and what the best practices are.

Guides

• Why React?
• Displaying Data
  • JSX in Depth
  • JSX Gotchas
• Interactivity and Dynamic UIs
• Multiple Components
• Reusable Components
• Forms
• Working With the Browser
  • More About Refs
• Tooling integration
• Reference