React is a library from the famous social networking facebook.
Another Javascript Library ! Yes, lets face it. Now we can not escape the fact that every other day there is someone, somwhere making a new Javascript library.
React is not a competition with the huge frameworks like AngularJS or BackboneJS. It neither is competing with the DOM manipulation libraries like jQuery. But for some reason for me, it seems like, React is making a standard for itself. Like jQuery did it for DOM manipulation, becoming a go to library, React is making a place for itself.
React is a library to write components for DOM.
Well, so what does it do ?! It allows us to write reusable component to be used in our HTML. With React, its possible to combine one or more HTML tag/tags and add some javascript to add functionality. Then we can take that component as a whole and reuse it as many times as we want. Thats all that is to it.
There is JSX in React. JSX in simple words, would be writing Javascript as if we are writing HTML. Well, that might not be the case if you already know what JSX is, but for a first timer its easier to understand like that. The official document is very good resource to understand JSX. You are not bound to use it but then, it obviously is an option.
So, React is not a MVC or MVVM or MV* framework ? No, its not. But it just is a library to write reusable HTML visual compoents. Take this library wherever you want and use it. That means, we can use this library in other frameworks, if we want to. This is like taking jQuery and adding it to the places we like to use it.
Happy React - ing.