FaxJs VS styled-components

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

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.