Not sure I fully follow this.. I understand component's don't pass messages to each other, don't redraw themselves. But isn't flux basically doing somewhat of a uni-directional message passing? Maybe my terminology is incorrect and i'm mixing up concepts , but it feels like a modified pub-sub type architecture (difference is that when something is dispatched its sent to _every_ registered callback as opposed to subscribing specifically). Still feels like a form of message passing. I really don't know enough about how old windows development worked, but from this article it seems like it's a _similar_ type of pattern.

One nitpick I have though is the giant switch statement they mention. I typically put all this into an object so you don't need to traverse through some huge switch. Not sure why everyone just doesn't do something like -

  AppDispatcher.register(function(action) {  
    actionMapper[action.actionType](action);  
  }