JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Isomorphic apps are almost like “normal” apps when creating them with the FRP. Because the FRP encourages you to always pass the entire state object to the rendering function, nothing prevents you to do the same in the backend as well.

If you have read other tutorials you may already know that React has a “backend-compatible” function called renderToString. It behaves exactly like render but doesn’t call componentDidMount and returns the rendered HTML as a string instead of placing it into a DOM node. Component & model in → HTML out. Couldn’t be simpler?

Well… actually, it could be. There are two gotchas you should know before trying to use renderToString:

1. Your backend must understand JSX syntax
2. Your front-end modules must be CommonJS compatible

Many people that use ReactJS as their renderer are using some kind of the
Flux architecture to store data, react to actions and notify components
about changes. After a University project involving Scala and RxJava, I wanted
to use these ideas together with ReactJS views. Besides that I found two things
missing in the Flux architecture:

composing different kinds of data easily
interaction with the server

Of course there are ways to solve this, but perhaps reactive streams can help
ease these shortcomings.