Skuunk Works

I have been using Facebook's React library for a while now (https://facebook.github.io/react/) and I like it for the most part. The most controversial aspect is the fact that the View is mixed into the Logic using what looks like HTML in the "JavaScript" file using JSX. While it is possible to write React components in plain JavaScript, you must include a render() method. However, it is actually possible to do the following... (in ES6 syntax) render() {   return (null); } Now, why would you want to do such a thing? I thought the whole point was to use React to tie together your view and logic layers (and shouldn't you be abstracting out your heavy logic to plain JS classes?). Well, the main reason you might want to do it is because of React's component lifecycle. In my case, I wanted to trigger some JS to run when the component was loaded, and I happen to be using Turbolinks and React-Rails in a Rails project. This JS had ...