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?
Despite it's size and focus at the consumer market, Facebook is very much a company driven by software and developers. This shows in their efforts of creating (sometimes rather unique) solutions to their own internal problems and then sharing those as Open Source. Just like the Symfony community, Facebook invests in Developer Experience by providing development tooling for these solutions.
Hack is a programming language for the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), created by Facebook as a dialect of PHP. The language implementation is open source, licensed under the BSD License.
While it is close to PHP it is not that exactly and can move away from the realm altogether as it progresses. In modern web development you'll need an IDE to keep your project organized and help you perform routine tasks easily.