Being 1kb. Not to be pedantic, but 147kb is a lot on a crappy connection, so if you have users in rural places with slow internet or tiny data caps, a small library like this may be useful.

Wouldn't you just use a CDN that your visitor's browser would pull a cached copy from if you were worried about large assets? They're only downloaded once*, might as well re-use the one downloaded the last time you visited a site with React. Or do I not understand how browser caching works?

This is nice in theory, but... A user visits site A. To get a cached version of React the following need to be true:

1. A user has to have visited a site, site B, with React recently. 2. The site with React needs to be using a publicly available CDN. 3. Site A and Site B must use the same CDN. 4. The versions of React must match exactly. There are already about a dozen alpha/patch/rc versions of the React 15.x.x series alone.

In practice, this does not happen very often: https://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2013/03/18/http-archive-jq...

Yeah, we need to save that 146kb so we can do dumb stuff like animate stars.

React minified is 147kb, which is actually significant if all you need is the functionality offered in Monkberry.

Looking at the gzipped size on cdnjs

- react minified 43.2kb

- react-dom minified 723b

What problem does reactjs solve? Why are javascript libraries used instead of generating HTML server side? I feel I'm out of touch, could someone give me a quick primer?

The biggest advantage of client-side rendering is that clicking a link doesn't require a full-page reload. Dynamically updating small portions of a page allows for a more snappy experience, especially when on a cellular data connection.

Right and wrong. If that’s all you need to do search for SennaJS or PJAX. What really f/e frameworks and libraries help you build is complex interactive interfaces. If you don’t see their use then means you don’t need them.

Yes. If people are using full MVC frameworks for the sole reason of avoiding page reloads then they really need to look at PJAX etc.

I can add PJAX to existing Django sites in about half an hour. It degrades gracefully, allows me to carry on generating my HTML on the server in a language I prefer and carries a very small cognitive overhead.

I understand TurboLinks in Rails is essentially the same concept?

Yeah, TurboLinks is the Rails counterpart.

To clarify a little: I personally use SennaJS a lot and React. They are two different things for different goals.

This library uses two-way data binding like angular, vue.js and many others. Two-way data binding libraries/frameworks are easier to use on small websites, but don't scale well to large single page applications.

A more awesome name