Derived Values, Flowing
This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation ... but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.
-- Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
reflecting on identity, flow and derived values (aka The Ship of Theseus)
Overview
re-frame is a ClojureScript framework for building user interfaces. It is has a data-oriented, functional design.
re-frame has been designed from the ground up to make developers very productive when building large Single-Page applications. That's its promise to you. For many, it has delivered on this goal, and it has been enthusiastically praised.
Developed in late 2014, and released in 2015, it is mature and stable. It scales to 50K lines of code and beyond. It is used by small startups and by companies with 500 developers. It has outlasted multiple generations of Javascript churn, and still delivers a substantially better developer experience. Just imagine your team's productivity if you didn't have to contend with technical churn, and have new magic burn your fingers every two years.
re-frame provides another unfair advantage - ClojureScript is a Lisp. Alan Kay once described Lisp as "Maxwell's equations of software". Paul Graham described how Lisp was a competitive advantage for his startup. When we use Lisp, we get to leverage 50 years of foliated excellence from the very best minds available. We also get to leverage a thriving ClojureScript community which delivers modern ideas and best-in-class tooling.
re-frame was created by a programmer who had been developing for two decades before the Web was even "a thing". Yeah, that old. He's seen a UI or two along the way. Still has hair.
Although re-frame leverages React, it only needs React to be a V in MVC, and no more. re-frame does not buy into the sadly-pervasive idea that Views should be causal (colocated queries, ComponentDidMount, hooks, etc). In re-frame, events are causal and views are purely reactive.
Documentation
The re-frame documentation is available here.
The Current Version
Can be seen in the clojars badge above.
Licence
re-frame is MIT licenced