React, Flux, GraphQL, Hack, HHVM...? All of this and more!
The technical preview of Facebook's Relay was launched early this week. It is fully Open Source and available on Github today. But what exactly is Relay and how does it relate to React and Flux?
In 2013 Facebook released React, a JavaScript tool that helps developers create complex user interfaces with high performance dynamic updates and independent components. In 2014 Facebook released Flux, a tool to keep track of the state on client side. In 2015 they completed the trio with Relay, a library that handles communications with the persistent storage (i.e. a remote server).
Here is a rundown of the Facebook JavaScript Clientside development stack:
All of these different items have specific roles and each of them can be replaced. Flux, for example has multiple competing implementations, such as Redux. They are well decouped an in traditional Facebook development team tradition, Relay is already dogfooded and in production on Facebook.com.
The development team lists the following future focus areas and possibilities
Together with these improvements and React Native, Facebook is merging tools for native application and web application development. Read more on the blog post introducting Relay to the world
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