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);