react-page

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This project is not actively maintained. Proceed at your own risk!

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Render React pages on the server or client - effortlessly.

Use CommonJS to build and share UI components.

Develop rapidly - instant reloading.

##Install (Mac/Linux - requires a recent version of node/npm)

Clone this project

git clone https://github.com/facebook/react-page
cd react-page
npm install                            # install dependencies.

Try out the server rendering

node server.js
# open http://localhost:8080/index.html
# Make changes to src/index.js, and refresh instantly!

##Philosophy

Why Server Rendering?

• Faster Pages: Markup displayed before downloading JS (with SEO benefits)
• Page generation on a fast server vs. low power client devices.
• Instantly refresh while developing.
• Static content sites: As easy as a single wget command.

Why React?

• React is a client/server rendering framework from the ground up.
• When performance constraints change, simply change where you render it - don't change your app.
• React is functional. Explore the documentation on the React Github Page.
• Server rendering optional - you can always just use React as a declarative client side framework.

##Developing

Default Project Structure

The included directory structure suggests a way to organize a single or multi-page app. npm install other components/libraries and they automatically work. It's the same commonJS that you know and love.

react-page/
 ├── package.json                # Add npm dependencies here.
 ├── server.js                   # Start web server with `node server.js`
 ├── ...                         # Create more pages/directories here
 └── src                         # All your application JS.
     ├── elements/               # Shared React components.
     │   ├── SiteBoilerPlate.js  # Reusable html/body component
     │   └── Banner.js           # An example component for displaying text
     │
     ├── index.js                # localhost:8080/index.html routed here
     └── pages                   # Make your site structure
         └── about.js            # localhost:8080/pages/about.html

Everything Is A Component

React's philosophy is that mutation-minimal functions and composition are the best tools for building sophisticated applications with low complexity. In React, "components" are the tool for composing. react-page embraces this simplicity, even allowing the entire page to be expressed as an arbitrarily deep composition of components.

react-page/src/index.js corresponds to index.html. index.js is a React component that renders the ,, and all the contents of the page.

If you look at index.js, you'll notice that it doesn't output all the s and s directly - it composes other components that take on much of that responsibility. index.js composes a component, and inside of `Banner.js`, you'll see that the implementation of outputs an DOM component. Even DOM representations such as are components in React

To build out your app, just add or install more components with npm.

Simple Default Page Routing

Requests to path/file.html are routed to your React component located at src/path/file.js. By default all page requests are routed to the src directory, but you can customize that behavior via the pageRouteRoot setting.

Here are a couple of examples of the default configuration:

http://localhost:8080/index.html => react-page/src/pages/index.js
http://localhost:8080/docs/hello.html => react-page/src/pages/docs/hello.js
http://localhost:8080/pages/about.html => react-page/src/pages/about/index.js
http://localhost:8080/path/img.png => react-page/src/path/img.png

• Currently, every html routing must map to a .js file that exports a single React component, that renders the page, including html/body tags.
• Routing is customizable (more later).

How Does Server Rendering Work?

• react-page computes page markup on the server, sends it to the client so the user can see it quickly.
• The corresponding JavaScript is then packaged and sent.
• The browser runs that JavaScript, so that all of the event handlers, interactions and update code will run seamlessly on top of the server generated markup.
• From the developer's (and the user's) perspective, it's just as if the rendering occurred on the client, only faster.

Command Line Usage:

# --useSourceMaps=true        # default:true
# --useBrowserBuiltins=false  # Allow node modules (util)  - default:false
# --logTiming=true            # Shows colored timing metrics - default:true
# --pageRouteRoot=  # page URLs root - default: react-page/src

# for example:
node server.js --useSourceMaps=true

Node Modules in the Browser: You can use modules installed via npm, but if anything requires builtin modules (such as util), make sure to enable the useBrowserBuiltins option.

React As A Blogging Engine:

React can power dynamic, network-connected apps. But with react-page, React can also be used to build a static blog, Github documentation, or any other static site. Because react-page uses server rendering, creating a static site is as easy as a single wget command.

node server.js
wget -mpck --user-agent="" -e robots=off http://localhost:8080/index.html

Get wget on OS X: try http://osxdaily.com/2012/05/22/install-wget-mac-os-x/ or if you have brew: brew install wget

This prebuilds your entire interactive site, so it can be served from a file server or github etc. Don't forget to enable gzip on your file server! React markup is large but compresses very well.

Motivations/Next-Steps:

-react-page is a rapid development environment for experimenting with new ways of building production web apps powered by React. It provides a common environment that allows sharing of modules client/server architecture prototypes.

In order to use this technology in a production environment, you must audit and verify that the server rendering strategy is safe and suitable for your purposes.

• You must ensure that a proper server sandbox is enforced. However, react-page does run your UI rendering code inside of contextify as a preliminary sandbox.

• In production, the js packaging features of react-page should be performed ahead of time and stored in a CDN. However, dynamic server rendering is a compelling production feature.

• Additional connect middleware should be added to prevent stack traces from showing up in browser.

TODO:

• Windows support (depends on fixing https://github.com/facebook/node-haste/pull/2)
• Allow sharing of css/images through npm packages.
• Experiments with optimizing page load time - incremental streaming of markup/resources.
• Advanced packaging such as splitting projects into several independently cacheable sub-packages.
• require('image/path/img.jpg') should resolve to image path.
• A way to automatically package/bundle css, regardless of file path of depending js resource. (using require('commonJSPath/to/css.css'))