Modern Full-Stack Development

 A Brief History of React
React (the logo for which you can see in Figure 
3-1
 because why not?), which is 
sometimes referred to as React.js or ReactJS (but I’ll stick with React because, like the 
Dude, I’m into the whole brevity thing), is a product of everyone’s favorite (or the exact 
opposite of favorite – there seems to be no middle ground) company: Facebook. React, in 
simplest terms, is a library for building web-based user interfaces.

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It all started back in around 2010 when Facebook developers who, despite any 
feelings about the company you may have, are quite talented began to run into a lot of 
issues with code maintenance. That’s nothing unusual in the modern web development 
world: especially when building Single-Page Apps (SPAs), it’s easy to make a massive 
mess of things if you don’t have robust architecture and disciplined adherence to it. 
As you bring more developers onto the team, doing that becomes exponentially more 
difficult.
Facebook faced this issue and found that their development velocity was slowing 
down immensely and their delivered quality was suffering for it, all of which are bad for a 
company trying to make a buck.
In 2010, the engineers introduced XHP into their PHP stack. XHP is an extension to 
PHP that augments the syntax and, so the argument goes at least, makes your PHP code 
easier to read. Perhaps the most significant thing it provides is the notion of composite 
components, which allows for an interface to be broken down into mostly independent 
but easily integrated units of functionality.
Then, in 2011, the first notion of what would become React emerged in large part 
based on some of the core concepts of XHP: FaxJs. This was a project created by an 
engineer by the name of Jordan Walke. FaxJs had several critical characteristics we now 
see in React, including the following: