React.js is the new popular guy around the “JavaScript Frameworks” block, and it shines for its simplicity. Where other frameworks implement a complete MVC framework, we could say React only implements the V (in fact, some people replace their framework’s V with React). React applications are built over 2 main principles: Components and States. Components can be made of other smaller components, built-in or custom; the State drives what the guys at Facebook call one-way reactive data flow, meaning that our UI will react to every change of state.
One of the good things about React is that it doesn’t require any additional dependencies, making it pluggable with virtually any other JS library. Taking advantage of this feature, we are going to include it into our Rails stack to build a frontend-powered application, or you might say, a Rails view on steroids.
www.airpair.com/reactjs/posts/reactjs-a-guide-for-rails-developers