Overview
React 14 has separated into two distinct libraries: React, React-DOM. This is important in understanding the modern messaging coming from the React team:
Virtual DOM is not the magic and allure of React; declarative programming is.
It feels like the team is messaging this distinction to illustrate that modern frameworks can adopt a Virtual DOM pipeline into their render strategies, but fundamentally that is just an optimization and not what makes React powerful.
React's power comes from its declarative style of programming:
f(x) = y
HelloWorld FTW
React just added stateless components to the component ecosystem to encourage developers to focus on component composition over state-full, heavy, component architectures.
Declarative programming in action:
const HelloWorld = ({ sayHello }) =>
<section>
<p>{sayHello}</p>
</section>
Usage:
render(<HelloWorld sayHello={'hi'} />, document.body);