FaxJs VS maud

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

I would like to mention maud in this context:

https://github.com/lambda-fairy/maud

It is refreshingly different from other Rust templating libraries. It uses a proc-macro that compiles your HTML into Rust code. I also happen to use it in conjunction with HTMX and it works very well for me (at least in small projects).

You can also use HTML templating with crates like askama, tera and maud! This can be combined with the power of lightweight JavaScript libraries like htmx to speed up time to production. You can read more about this on our other article about using HTMX with Rust which you can find here.. We also collaborated with Stefan Baumgartner on an article for serving HTML with Askama!

I think a lot of us reach for Jinja-style templates so it feels a little more like we're writing bare HTML. But they're of course still just templates, and they need a build step before they become valid HTML.

So it's true, if you're willing to use a DSL embedded in your server language (like JSX), then you'll have the full language tooling available to you. And this probably isn't giving up much over language-specific templates.

A JSX-equivalent for the Rust server-side rendering world would probably be maud [1] or leptops [2].

[1] https://github.com/lambda-fairy/maud

[2] https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos

Maud as a performant templating engine that will ensure your templates are well-formed at compile-time and, in effect, minify the generated HTML output by not passing through unnecessary whitespace.

Maud is a fast Slim/Haml-esque templating engine which will automatically minify your HTML at no extra charge because whitespace isn't significant in its syntax.

If you want to do backend development, give actix-web or Axum a try. If you need templating, take a look at Maud and if you want an ORM, take a look at SeaORM.

Personally, I'd recommend Maud if you don't need something with runtime reloading. Not only is it much faster, it implements a template language that is effectively the Rust-syntax equivalent to Slim or Haml using a procedural macro, so you get compile-time verification that your HTML output is well-formed.

For templating, Maud is fast, gives compile-time well-formedness guarantees, and outputs minified HTML by default as a side-effect of it being based on Rust macros. (It's of a similar design philosophy to Slim and Haml)