React vs XSLT in-browser implementation

Since every single UI component is created independently in JavaScript, it becomes very easy to reuse them throughout your app without having to re-write them.

React is built by Facebook engineers initially to be used only for their inner projects especially to solve the problem of building large complex applications with constantly changing data.

React can render it's components and data server side, then it sends those components as HTML to the browser.

This ensures faster initial loading time and SEO friendliness out of the box, since it's indexed as any other static website by search engines.

Instead of relying on the DOM, React implements a virtual DOM from scratch, allowing it to calculate precisely what needs to be patched during the next screen refresh. This is orders of magnitude faster than fiddling with the DOM itself.

React's one-way data binding (or one-way data flow) means that it's easy to see where and how your UI is updated and where you need to make changes. It's also very easy to keep everything modular, fast and well-organized.

ReactJS can be used independently as the only library for building the front-end, or it can be used alongside JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, or even Angular.

React provides a template engine (JSX) which is easy to use. But it's not mandatory.

The framework is widely used in the industry.

Since React's virtual DOM system is implemented completely in JavaScript, it's very easy to write UI test cases.

React has an official Chrome Extension which is used as a developing and debugging tool. It can be used to quickly and painlessly debug your application or view the whole application structure as it's rendered.

Flux is a platform agnostic pattern which can technically be used with any application or programming language.

One of Flux' main features is that it enforces uni-directional data flow which means that views do not change the data directly.

With React this is useful because this way it's easier to understand an application as it starts getting more complicated. By having two-way data binding, lead to unpredictable changes, where changing one model's data would end up updating another model. By using the Flux architecture, this can be avoided.

Since React v0.15, SVG is fully supported. React supports all SVG attributes that are recognized by today's browsers.

React is just a view library, so you still have (almost) full control over how your app behaves.

Reagent, Om, Rum, etc.

React is used on one of the most visited websites on the planet, Facebook. With stellar results and with millions of people experiencing it every day.

I.e. apply one template on top of another.

With ability to split feature implementation apart from main codebase, development became quite more manageable. Example: for data of particular type you could define own rendering or render refine rules; pipelining allows incrementally change UI by adding/removing elements depend of parameters, data values, previously rendered content.

Only template engine which utilizes multithreading.

In some browsers(IE) XSLT during load is compiled into DLL. In others pre-loaded template allows to skip recurring parsing .

XML when stored, saved outside of JS heap, capable to work with amount of data 100x larger of JSON.

Supported in all browsers, starting from IE5.

XSLT is available as in browser as on server side via various libs including highly optimized for CPU.