Why did we build React?

When your data changes, the render method is called again. In order to perform updates as efficiently as possible, we diff the return value from the previous call to render with the new one, and generate a minimal set of changes to be applied to the DOM.

.. Because React has its own lightweight representation of the document, we can do some pretty cool things with it:

  • Facebook has dynamic charts that render to <canvas> instead of HTML.
  • Instagram is a “single page” web app built entirely with React and Backbone.Router. Designers regularly contribute React code with JSX.
  • We’ve built internal prototypes that run React apps in a web worker and use React to drive native iOS views via an Objective-C bridge.
  • You can run React on the server for SEO, performance, code sharing and overall flexibility.
  • Events behave in a consistent, standards-compliant way in all browsers (including IE8) and automatically use event delegation.