React: Difference between revisions

 

{{Cquote|One of the first projects that React was used for was the UFI, the Universal Feedback Interface. Which is basically the likes, comments and shares at the bottom of each post. Newsfeed had a billion people hitting it every day and was massively tuned for performance. On the input side of course you're like clicking it to add likes, you're typing into it to add comments, but also on the receiving side we want comments to come in live. So as you're looking at it as a comment comes in, we want it to just pop up right there. And there was this product desire for that interface to fell almost like a one-off chat thread.

 

Instagram joined Facebook in 2012. There was a couple of engineers from Facebook that went to join Instagram to help them expand the product offering. At the time Instagram was just an iOS and an Android app and they wanted to have a web presence as well. One morning the photo's team got called into the office early. They said like be at HQ at 8am and then the VP of engineering was like, "Hey, we bought Instagram, they're your new co-workers now." And that's kind of where React enters the picture. That ended up shipping on Instagram.com, which was the second use of React in production ever and the first use of building a full application end to end in React. We had to take this thing that was very much tied to Facebook's infrastructure, which back then was a big giant PHP application.