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Comment by yaddayadda | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm missing something, but that comparison looks like apples versus oranges, or more specifically JavaScript-side versus HTML-side. The React example looks like the JS-side only, while the Riot example looks like the HTML-side only. What am I missing?

edit: I see a touch of embedded script (i.e. handleSubmit) in the Riot example, but not nearly enough to replicate the JS code in the React example. And there is a <script> call, but it looks more like an Angular partial than an actual script.

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I haven't used React in about 6 months, but I'm pretty certain the Riot code does the exact same thing.

If you haven't used React, it has JSX as syntactic sugar for what would otherwise be a bunch of javascript: see the "render" function in createClass. So a component is written in JS.

With Riot, the JS goes into the template to create a component.

There's a lot of things to like about React, but it requires some boilerplate and a larger API in order to support the amount of freedom it offers in updating (that Riot page goes into this a bit).

If you want something that keeps the HTML and JS separate but still allows components, while having a straightforward API along with a small file size, check out knockoutjs.com

> If you want something that keeps the HTML and JS separate ...

I guess my JS knowledge is small enough that I just expect the HTML and JS to be primarily separated. (It seems like a best practice to me, but I haven't experimented with code that wasn't primarily separated, so I'm sure I'm missing some important insights).

Thank you for making the knockoutjs.com recommendation. For someone, with primarily Angular experience, who is looking to broaden their horizon, which of the three would you recommend as the next framework to learn: React, Riot, or Knockout?

I believe that React would offer you a very different perspective. It also has a strong developer community; React is already being used in a lot of places (although Azure's management interface was just recently redone using Knockout). I've also heard that you can combine React and Angular.

Reading this will take a bit of time, but it will help you to understand React's approach: http://jlongster.com/Removing-User-Interface-Complexity,-or-...

After this, the React tutorial should get you up and going. Once you start working on more complex apps, look into the Flux architecture (an approach to application structure that Facebook uses with React, like you'd use MVC/MVVM/etc otherwise).

React components written in JavaScript with embedded "JSX".

Riot components are HTML (mixed with expressions) + JavaScript.

Perhaps the HTML root element makes it look like "HTML-side only".

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