The History of React.js on a Timeline - RisingStack Engineering (2024)

• Last updated: May 30, 2024

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The appearance of React.js dramatically widened the opportunities for front-end developers in creating user-friendly interfaces.

To show its unique features, we’ve been publishing a lot about React.js. Moreover, our excellent front-end expert, Miklos Bertalan has started aseries of live streamswhere he shows how to build React apps on afree, locally hosted server– created by another brilliant engineer at Risingstack, Robert Czinege.

To have a better understanding of React, let’s have a sneak peek at how everything started. I have collected the most significant milestones in the history of React, which you’ll be able to see in this timeline below.

The need for a better code

Back in 2011, the developers at Facebook started to face some issues with code maintenance. As the Facebook Ads app got an increasing number of features, the team needed more people to keep it running flawlessly. The growing number of team-members and app-features slowed them down as a company. Over time, their app became difficult to handle, as they faced a lot of cascading updates.

After a while, engineers at Facebook couldn’t keep up with these cascading updates. Their code demanded an urgent upgrade to become more efficient.

They had the model right, but they needed to do something about user experience. So, Jordan Walke built a prototype that made the process more efficient, and this marks the birth of React.js.
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Let’s look at the history of React.js on a timeline

From 2010 until now (March 2018):

We got a feedback that certain dates were incorrect in our timeline: React was open sourced in May, during the JS ConfUS 2013, and React London 2014 was held on April 7-9. Now, we have updated our timeline. Please, if you find any other inaccuracies, do let us know in the comment section below or on Twitter.

2010 – The first signs of React

• Facebook introduced xhp into its php stackand open sourced it.
  Xhp allowed creating composite components. They introduced this syntax later in React.

2011 – An early prototype of React

• Jordan Walke createdFaxJS, the early prototype of React – shipped a search element on Facebook.

2012 – Something new had started at Facebook

• Facebook Ads became hard to manage, so Facebook needed to come up with a good solution for it. Jordan Walke worked on the prototype and created React.
• April 9:Instagram was acquired by Facebook.
  Instagram wanted to adopt Facebook’s new technology. By this, Facebook had a pressure to decouple React from Facebook and make it open-sourceable. Most of this was done by Pete Hunt.
• Sept 8-12:TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg: “Our Biggest Mistake Was Betting Too Much On HTML5”. He promised that Facebook would deliver better mobile experiences very soon.

2013 – The year of the Big Launch

• May 29-31: JS ConfUS.Jordan Walke introduced React.React gets open sourced.Fun Fact: The audience was skeptical. Most people thought React was a huge step backward. This happened as mostly ‘early adopters’ attended this conference, however, React targeted ‘innovators.’ The creators of React realized this mistake on time, and decided to start a ‘React tour’ later on to turn haters into advocates.
• June 2: React (by Facebook)is available on JSFiddle
• July 30:React and JSX in available in Ruby on Rails
• August 19:React and JSX available in Python Applications
• Sept 14-15: JSConfEU 2013. Pete Hunt’s speech ofrethinking best practices.
• Dec 17: David NolenIntroduces OM, based on React. Explains how React is awesome – which reached early adopters. This article showed how React is better than the other alternatives out there, which boosted the acknowledgement of React.

2014 – The year of Expansion

React had gradually gained its reputation and started to go through to ‘early majority’ of its potential users. At this point, they needed a new message instead of solely relying on its technical benefits, and it is: how is React stable? By focusing on this, they aimed to appeal to enterprises, like Netflix.

• Early 2014: #reactjsworldtour conferences started, to build community and to ‘turn haters into advocates’.
• Jan 2:React Developer Toolsbecomes an extension of the Chrome Developer Tools.
• February: Atom was introduced – A hackable text editor for the 21st Century
• April 7-9:React London 2014
• June:ReactiveX.ioemerged.
• July 13: The Release ofReact Hot Loader. React Hot Loader is a plugin that allows React components to be live reloaded without the loss of state.
• Dec 12:PlanOut: A language for online experiments. The release of PlanOut 0.5, which includes a React-based PlanOut language editor, and brings the interpreter into feature-parity with the latest version of PlanOut used internally at Facebook.

2015 – React is Stable

• Early 2015: Flipboard releasesReact Canvas.
• January:Netflix likes React
• Early 2015: Airbnb uses React
• January 28-29: React.js Conf 2015 – Facebook released thefirst version of React Nativefor the React.js Conf 2015 during a technical talk.
• February:Introducing Relay and GraphQLat React.js Conf.
• March 25: Facebook announced thatReact Native for iOS is open and available on GitHub.
• June 2: Redux was released by Dan Abramov and Andrew Clark.
• Sept 2: The first stable version of the newReact Developer Toolslaunched.
• Sept 14:React Native for Androidwas released.

2016 – React gets mainstream

• March: The introduction ofMobx
• February 22-23:React.js Conf 2016, San Francisco
• Draft.js was introducedat React.js Conf by Isaac Salier-Hellendag
• March: The introduction ofReact Storybook
• June 2-3:ReactEurope 2016
• July 11: Introducing React’sError Code System.
• November: the introduction ofBlueprint– A React UI toolkit for the web

2017 – The year of further improvements

• Early 2017: Airbnb introduces their new open source libraryReact Sketch.app
• Apr 19:React Fibergets open sourced at F8 2017.
• Sept:Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js
• Sept 26:React 16: error boundaries, portals, fragments and the Fiber architecture
• October:Netflix removes client-side React.js
• November 28: React v16.2.0:Improved Support for Fragments

2018 – What’s up with React now?

• March 1-2:JSConf Iceland–Beyond React 16 by Dan Abramov
• 2018 March 29:React 16.3.0was released.

What’s next?

This journey has been fun so far, but there is certainly a lot more to learn about React. With this in mind, we decided to host aReact Training in Warsaw, on June 21-22. If you are considering to deepen your React knowledge, don’t hesitate to join us there.

Did I miss anything from the list? Or did you find any inaccuracies? Leave a comment below or find us on Twitter and let us know.