react-hot-loader

Oh well, at this point we're moving into subjective opinion. But you need to write your frontend SPA with JS. And the isomorphic part, if designed from the ground up adds almost no extra code. So, really it's almost free to render first with Node, if you're starting a fresh SPA. I don't see why you wouldn't want to do it. And we can all agree the ES5 has some warts, so you may as well transpile. Whether it's ClojureScript, Coffee, Type, or anything else doesn't matter, I just think it's a problem solved. Webpack makes debugging them easy with sourcemaps and live-compilation. In fact you can get hot-reloading[1] in React. So your app re-compiles without reloading. I'm happy with ES6 + Flow. It's all ES6 syntax anyway, works with all libraries, and is fast to write, good looking, and functional. [1] https://github.com/gaearon/react-hot-load

Reminds me of this: - http://gaearon.github.io/react-hot-loader/ - https://github.com/gaearon/react-hot-loader

There's another advantage to virtual DOM: you can hot-swap code while developing and have React run its diff algorithm without reloading the page. If your component has no (or little) side-effects, it means you get live reload as you edit for free. This is impossible with Backbone/jQuery soup of a view. See my proof of concept video: https://vimeo.com/100010922 And actually runnable example that you can edit without refresh: https://github.com/gaearon/react-hot-loader I plan to write a blog post explaining how to integrate it into React project soon.

Shameless plug: though unrelated to the article, for the past few days I've been working on live reload for React components. As you edit JSX files, after a small delay, components re-render in browser, using React's diff algorithm to reconcile DOM. This means their state is not destroyed. For example, you can live-edit a modal window without having to refresh and open it again. You can change event handlers and debug a complex component on the fly. There are no browser plugins involved, it's all just JS. This is implemented on top of Webpack, if you want to give it a try, check it out! (I assume familiarity with Webpack, but I plan to write an explanatory blogpost later.) I'm very excited about this because I think it's the future of front-end development. It is possible thanks to React's separation of side-effects and Webpack's powerful