React is mostly hype

React is a pretty simple concept (with, perhaps, a complex implementation) reified in a library. It's basically componentized state machines for UI rendering. Comparing it to general "web frameworks" is completely missing the point. Granted, some people do [often needlessly] install a lot of react-whatevers for everything from routing to mysql fetching (yep).

I can see it being replaced by another library with a similar underlying philosophy that just does it better, but I don't really see how the general idea would vanish soon.

And btw Facebook uses it a lot on the web too (not just the often mentioned Ad Manager), messaging (and messenger.com) is basically all React and other components are a mix. Download the React Devtool to check it out, they don't obfuscate the React tree at all. Pretty fun to browse.

What I need in every project is react for the UI, babel for modern JS and webpack. (I went through combinations of gulp, browserify, requirejs and brunch. Webpack finally solved the packaging-mess for me).

Redux is something you can implement yourself easily, I never understood the need for a library there.

The good idea of redux is to have a serialisable state which is changed through events. This gives you unidirectional data-flow and the ability to pause/restore your application.

Complete immutability and funneling everything through functions on the other hand often just obscures readability, and, in case you are using immutablejs, gives you terrible performance.

If I want to have purely functional programs I don't use Javascript, but Haskell or something. If I need time-travelling debugging, which I never found very useful when dealing with complex states, I'll implement it by copying my state using serialization.

I don't see if it makes much sense to compare Angular with React.

Heck, it's like a Pythonista would go comparing Django and Jinja. One's a framework, another's a template library. Same goes for Angular and React - Angular's a framework that tries to be do-it-all solution (UI rendering, validation, data model description, data persistence and communications with server, and more), React's an long-distant ancestor of templating libraries that essentially does only one thing - takes a data structure, a component definition and renders (and maintains) a DOM tree.

Seems that many are calling non-React pieces that are frequently used with React (e.g. Redux, Flux, Immutable.js, Restful.js) to be "React" as well, while they don't seem have any ties to it.

But, yea, loose coupling's great. And React is a very nice library.

I've used React in four projects (after many projects in Angular[1])

1. In terms of best practices, React for serious development is a disaster just by itself. Read on.. This is what happened in my first project (when I didn't use Redux). By itself it is only good(and great) for POCs. And React-ecosystem is complex to start with. React-Redux, Router, Axios, Webpack make React complete for use in any serious project.

2. React makes web-componenting pretty easy. However it is counter-intuitive when you start thinking about the all important Smart Vs Dumb components separation. I don't know about others, but I like to see components as behaviour-complete stuff and not just view-complete. React with its ecosystem does things in a view-complete way. Yes, it does result in much much lesser bugs.

3. React is hyped because of its simple examples. As I said earlier, it makes it easier to create behaviour-complete web components. But then the ecosystem says "NO. NO.. Think in REACT way". That is not wrong but its complex. The first project in React was a disaster because of the complex state management I did without using redux or flux.

4. After working with React - when I tried Angular2, I moved back to React again. And I did React+TypeScript which makes coding even easier. The only thing I still like in Angular2 is now-not-default two-way data binding.

Do I love React? May be not so much - but its the best I have seen. But I love the way my apps remain bug free without a lot of front-end testing code. And once you add TypeScript, development is just a bit more easier and bugs get thrown up at compile/transpile time

Right, if you look at the contents of the license in the discussion, they are variants of "if you try to fight us with patents, we will deny you a license/patents".

So you can compete with FB without losing a license. The first blog post you quoted shows a misunderstanding of the license (the word "compete" doesn't show up in the license).

So the correct representation is "If you claim patent infringement by FB, you can lose the license.". This is what the linked comments say, but what your summarised statement didn't properly capture (hence my comment).