React v0.8

December 19, 2013 by Paul O’Shannessy

I’ll start by answering the obvious question:

What happened to 0.6 and 0.7?

It’s become increasingly obvious since our launch in May that people want to use React on the server. With the server-side rendering abilities, that’s a perfect fit. However using the same copy of React on the server and then packaging it up for the client is surprisingly a harder problem. People have been using our react-tools module which includes React, but when browserifying that ends up packaging all of esprima and some other dependencies that aren’t needed on the client. So we wanted to make this whole experience better.

We talked with Jeff Barczewski who was the owner of the react module on npm. He was kind enough to transition ownership to us and release his package under a different name: autoflow. I encourage you to check it out if you’re writing a lot of asynchronous code. In order to not break all of react’s current users of 0.7.x, we decided to bump our version to 0.8 and skip the issue entirely. We’re also including a warning if you use our react module like you would use the previous package.

In order to make the transition to 0.8 for our current users as painless as possible, we decided to make 0.8 primarily a bug fix release on top of 0.5. No public APIs were changed (even if they were already marked as deprecated). We haven’t added any of the new features we have in master, though we did take the opportunity to pull in some improvements to internals.

We hope that by releasing react on npm, we will enable a new set of uses that have been otherwise difficult. All feedback is welcome!

Changelog

React

  • Added support for more attributes:

    • rows & cols for <textarea>
    • defer & async for <script>
    • loop for <audio> & <video>
    • autoCorrect for form fields (a non-standard attribute only supported by mobile WebKit)
  • Improved error messages
  • Fixed Selection events in IE11
  • Added onContextMenu events

React with Addons

  • Fixed bugs with TransitionGroup when children were undefined
  • Added support for onTransition

react-tools

  • Upgraded jstransform and esprima-fb

JSXTransformer

  • Added support for use in IE8
  • Upgraded browserify, which reduced file size by ~65KB (16KB gzipped)