A very large number of people use React in the same way, linking to a cdn.

yunyu · on Aug 19, 2017

Could you explain your rationale? I highly doubt that a very large number of people are hand-writing render functions... I personally gave up on React and only picked it up several months later after finding out that using it with just a script embed was exceedingly painful.

jotto · on Aug 19, 2017

  <div id='root'></div>

  <script src='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/15.6.1/react.js'></script>
  <script src='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/15.6.1/react-dom.js'></script>
  <script src='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/babel-core/5.8.38/browser.min.js'></script>

  <script type='text/babel'>
    const App = () => <div>Hello World</div>;
    ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById('root'))
  </script>

bastawhiz · on Aug 20, 2017

A lot of people will have a bundle that they've transpiled, but use the global React object from pulling in React and ReactDOM from a CDN. Other folks will use a library that offers syntax like:

  elem.div(elem(Component, {prop: 'value'}), {className: 'foo'})

It's surprisingly common, and it's listed not too far down on the React installation page:

https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/installation.html

octalmage · on Aug 19, 2017

You can include a babel script that compiles everything on load. There's a performance hit but people do it because it's easy.

Edit: more information: https://github.com/babel/babel-standalone/blob/master/README...

ry_ry · on Aug 20, 2017

Babel-standalone was put together as part of the pretty good reactjs.net .Net implementation of react, after the 'official' version of babel-in-the-browser was killed off.

It's /really/ not intended for use in prod.

.

Edit. I kinda sent off on a stream of conciseness about reactjs.net here, feel free to ignore this bit.... :D

Infact, as well made as it is and despite using reactjs.net heavily for the last couple of years, the only time i would be inclined to use it on a new app is to leverage the universal rendering, or if your react app is just freaking massive and takes forever to run a build - otherwise you may aswell just throw everything at webpack --watch via iisnode or regular 'ole vanilla node.

Then again we had to make a bunch of changes to the package itself to fully support our bundling (we don't like cassette so we made our own) and to support multiple server-side bundles, none of which are agnostic enough to warrant a PR, so upgrading reactjs.net to a more recent version is a hassle, making me slightly biased against using it ;)