FAQ about React and Drupal Core

Why did we choose React?

• Popularity
  • https://stateofjs.com/2017/front-end/results
  • https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso
  • https://github.com/topics/react
• Maturity
  • https://github.com/facebook/react/tree/0.3-stable
• Familiarity of the library with core JS maintainers
• We can change our mind! The choice of library which renders HTML to the browser is probably the easiest part of the body of work we need to do - the tricky problems lie in the bridge between Drupal and the front-end framework

Why didn't you choose Vue or Angular? We can add data attributes to our Twig templates to use it

Many client projects built with Drupal have successfully leveraged this model for many years to build sites with embedded snippets of JavaScript. It's also quite possible to build a stand-alone admin theme as a single page app right now (with a limited feature set!). However, the goal of this initiative isn't to create something that's tightly coupled into the Drupal theming monolith. We're very aligned with the API-first initiative and hope that through this work we can create something which is reusable with other front-end frameworks such as Vue or Angular, and pluggable from modules.

The initial research showed that every JS framework can render applications. The hard problems aren't in that area, but rather in areas like: How do you handle forms etc.

I heard there were patent issues with React

As of version 16, React is now released under the MIT license.

See https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2915586#comment-12298246 for more information.