FaxJs VS js-xml-literal

More accurately, Facebook engineer Jordan Walke created the small UI framework FaxJs, Facebook realized that a technology like this could solve their horrible mess of cascading DOM updates that made it near-impossible to make product improvements, and they soon turned it into React.

That's actually the heritage of JSX!

XHP was launched in 2010 (https://www.facebook.com/notes/10158791323777200/)

The first version of FaxJs (the precursor to React) was launched in 2011, being directly inspired from XHP (https://github.com/jordwalke/FaxJs)

React was made in 2012 by the same person who made FaxJs, taking the best ideas from FaxJs and creating React.

So yeah, JSX actually comes from the idea of XHP :)

React was introduced to the world in May 2013 at a JavaScript conference in the US. It proved to be a game-changer and quickly became the king of JavaScript libraries. It was brought into existence by Jordan Walke, a software engineer at Facebook. He also created FaxJS in 2011, the early prototype of React.

Around a decade ago, Facebook started looking for a way to modernize its web app. It was becoming increasingly complicated, and they needed a framework to make it easier to build and maintain. To fix this, they created a project called Bolt. Bolt was an MVC framework built on top of JavelinJS, and it solved many of the problems Facebook had. However, it was not perfect. Jordan Walke, a developer at Facebook, created the next iteration of Bolt, called FaxJS. It offered many features that React has today, like rendering on both client and server, DOM diffing, and more. Jordan Walke renamed FaxJS FBolt and started using it in Facebook's codebase.

Source: FaxJs on GitHub

Also keep in mind that when React was created by Jordan Walke, he was trying to solve a very specific problem (correctly displaying notification / message counts, which was a big issue at Facebook at the time), and not setting out to create a complete and all-encompassing UI framework. If you're interested in the prototype, FaxJS, which he created, and which subsequently spawned React, here's the repo: https://github.com/jordwalke/FaxJs

In 2013, Facebook renamed FBolt, you guessed it, React. Additionally, they started working on JSX, an abstraction layer for defining UI in React. JSX made compiling HTML like statements to JavaScript function calls. Interestingly, according to a post by the React team, JSX was initially based on a system in PHP that allowed for embedding XML literals. JSX was initially just a fork of jsx-xml-literal.