Two experienced developers and speakers will share their experiences with FP using Facebook's highly popular React.js. August Lilleaas, famous for his Clojure and ZeroMQ ventures and popular JavaZone talks, will show us React in pure JS while Christian Johansen, the author of Test-Driven JS Development and (co-)author of Buster and Sinon, will show us React used via the ClojureScript wrapper Om.
Pizza and drinks will be served 18:45 - 19. (Normal & vegetarian; let us know in advance if you would like to have a gluten-free one as well.)
A. Lilleaas: Advanced Facebook React
Facebook React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It is completely different from AngularJS, Backbone, Ember, and the others. We'll look at building some concrete user interfaces with Facebook React, and try to reflect the challenges we face when we're building actual user interfaces at work (no "build a todo list in 15 minutes"). I've used AngularJS a lot, so we'll also look at some cases that compares AngularJS and Facebook React so we can learn what their benefits and tradeoffs are.
React is also relevant to us functional programmers, since it's architected in a very functional way. Essentially, you return your UI as a value, instead of doing fancy partial updates yourself to improve performance.
We'll also look at building a single page web app using React that also renders your UI from the server, without any code duplication. So your site works without JS enabled, is crawled by search engines, and gets content rendered immediately on mobile without having to wait for JS to download and run.
