D3.js and Reactjs


The world of Javascript is complicated (some might say, insane). I recently discovered that to use the newest version of Javascript (ES 2015), there are a whole suite of build tools and transpilers that will turn your ES2015 code into JS that can run on current (IE9+) browsers. Okay!

A popular new technology for from end web UI is Reactjs. It's developed and released by Facebook, and solves problems for them by using components. So, it must be useful for everyone, right?

If you use D3 to build awesome web graphics, then you might think so. But the problems that it solves are already solved by D3, namely DOM manipulation. The following post goes into a few different ways of getting them to play together, but I'll throw up the caution flag that you're just making things more complicated.

D3 within React the right way by Oliver Caldwell. Impressive work, and he totally understands how both of these technologies work, deeply. Kudos!

Perhaps a benchmark of the performance gain or loss by these approaches would help answer if there is any reason at all, because it's not making the code much prettier. I'll be sticking with the module pattern for building re-usable D3!

Cheers!