Pros and Cons of Facebook's React vs. Web Components (Polymer)
What are the main benefits of Facebook's React over the upcoming Web Components spec and vice versa (or perhaps a more apples-to-apples comparison would be to Google's Polymer library)?
According to this JSConf EU talk and the React homepage, the main benefits of React are:
- Decoupling and increased cohesion using a component model
- Abstraction, Composition and Expressivity
- Virtual DOM & Synthetic events (which basically means they completely re-implemented the DOM and its event system)
- Enables modern HTML5 event stuff on IE 8
- Server-side rendering
- Testability
- Bindings to SVG, VML, and
<canvas>
Almost everything mentioned is being integrated into browsers natively through Web Components except this virtual DOM concept (obviously). I can see how the virtual DOM and synthetic events can be beneficial today to support old browsers, but isn't throwing away a huge chunk of native browser code kind of like shooting yourself in the foot in the long term? As far as modern browsers are concerned, isn't that a lot of unnecessary overhead/reinventing of the wheel?
Here are some things I think React is missing that Web Components will care of. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- Native browser support (read "guaranteed to be faster")
- Write JavaScript in vanilla JavaScript, write CSS in CSS, write HTML in HTML.
- Style encapsulation using Shadow DOM
- React instead has this, which requires writing CSS in JavaScript. Not pretty.
- Two-way binding