FaxJs VS vanilla-extract

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 our experience, the best testing strategy for modern frontends is a combination of E2E testing (using Playwright+NextJS), and unit testing. Visual regression testing is not worth the effort in our opinion, especially with the advent of better CSS tooling like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract.

For building component libraries I’ve been a big fan of vanilla extract. Apparently it’s from the same people who made css modules

This sounds exactly like Vanilla Extract. https://vanilla-extract.style/

KumaUI : Another relatively new contender, Kuma uses zero runtime CSS-in-JS to create headless UI components which allows a lot of flexibility. It was heavily inspired by other zero runtime CSS-in-JS solutions such as PandaCSS, Vanilla Extract, and Linaria, as well as by Styled System, ChakraUI, and Native Base. ### Vue

The components are styled with CSS modules. When building the library, these styles will get transformed to normal CSS style sheets. This means that the consuming application will not even be required to support CSS modules. (In the future I want to extend this tutorial to use vanilla-extract instead.)

I do a lot of UI work and have never understood the appeal of Tailwind. It’s like relearning a new language. Tailwind was released in 2017. Maybe the CSS landscape wasn’t as good back then? Modern CSS is pretty awesome.

I’ve enjoyed using Vanilla Extract https://vanilla-extract.style/. It’s like css-in-js with none of the downsides as everything gets compiled to css.

Nah, I used enough Tailwind to know it becomes a spaghetti mess. I stick with CSS now, and in React I use https://vanilla-extract.style, compile time CSS in TypeScript.

Vanilla Extract is my current choice for the next greenfield project. I would also recommend checking out how and why this team integrated it with Tailwind.

I'm not trying to call a particular org or library out, because I think the ones I've been digging through (and prompted me to write this) are very high quality. It's vanilla-extract (a build-time CSS-in-JS library) and Braid Design System (built on vanilla-extract).

Apart from what has been suggested, there is also https://vanilla-extract.style/.