reagent/README.md

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# Reagent
A simple [ClojureScript](http://github.com/clojure/clojurescript) interface to [React](http://facebook.github.io/react/).
The main repository for Reagent is now located [here](https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent).
Reagent provides a way to write efficient React components using (almost) nothing but plain ClojureScript functions.
* **[Detailed intro with live examples](http://reagent-project.github.io/)**
* **[News](http://reagent-project.github.io/news/index.html)**
* **[Reagent Project Mailing List](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/reagent-project)**
To create a new Reagent project simply run:
lein new reagent myproject
This will setup a new Reagent project with some reasonable defaults, see here for more [details](https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent-template).
To use Reagent in an existing project you add this to your dependencies in `project.clj`:
[reagent "0.5.0-alpha"]
You also need to include react.js itself. One way to do this is to add
:preamble ["reagent/react.js"]
to the *:compiler* section of project.clj, as shown in the examples
directory (or "reagent/react.min.js" in production). You could also
add
<script src="http://fb.me/react-0.12.1.js"></script>
directly to your html.
## Examples
Reagent uses [Hiccup-like](https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup) markup instead of React's sort-of html. It looks like this:
```clj
(defn some-component []
[:div
[:h3 "I am a component!"]
[:p.someclass
"I have " [:strong "bold"]
[:span {:style {:color "red"}} " and red"]
" text."]])
```
You can use one component inside another:
```clj
(defn calling-component []
[:div "Parent component"
[some-component]])
```
And pass properties from one component to another:
```clj
(defn child [name]
[:p "Hi, I am " name])
(defn childcaller []
[child "Foo Bar"])
```
You mount the component into the DOM like this:
```clj
(defn mountit []
(reagent/render-component [childcaller]
(.-body js/document)))
```
assuming we have imported Reagent like this:
```clj
(ns example
(:require [reagent.core :as reagent :refer [atom]]))
```
State is handled using Reagent's version of `atom`, like this:
```clj
(def click-count (atom 0))
(defn state-ful-with-atom []
[:div {:on-click #(swap! click-count inc)}
"I have been clicked " @click-count " times."])
```
Any component that dereferences a `reagent.core/atom` will be automatically re-rendered.
If you want do some setting up when the component is first created, the component function can return a new function that will be called to do the actual rendering:
```clj
(defn timer-component []
(let [seconds-elapsed (atom 0)]
(fn []
(js/setTimeout #(swap! seconds-elapsed inc) 1000)
[:div
"Seconds Elapsed: " @seconds-elapsed])))
```
This way you can avoid using React's lifecycle callbacks like `getInitialState` and `componentWillMount` most of the time.
But you can still use them if you want to, either using `reagent.core/create-class` or by attaching meta-data to a component function:
```clj
(def my-html (atom ""))
(defn plain-component []
[:p "My html is " @my-html])
(def component-with-callback
(with-meta plain-component
{:component-did-mount
(fn [this]
(reset! my-html (.-innerHTML (reagent/dom-node this))))}))
```
See the examples directory for more examples.
## Performance
React is pretty darn fast, and so is Reagent. It should even be faster than plain old javascript React a lot of the time, since ClojureScript allows us to skip a lot of unnecessary rendering (through judicious use of React's `shouldComponentUpdate`).
The ClojureScript overhead is kept down, thanks to lots of caching.
Code size is a little bigger than React.js, but still quite small. The todomvc example clocks in at roughly 53K gzipped, using advanced compilation.
## About
The idea and some of the code for making components atom-like comes from [pump](https://github.com/piranha/pump). The reactive-atom idea (and some code) comes from [reflex](https://github.com/lynaghk/reflex).
The license is MIT.