
They share some likenesses, but there are a few important distinctions. Initially released in 2013, React was designed to be a library for helping developers craft user interfaces (UIs).Īccording to Henning Koch, React and Unpoly aren’t entirely opposites. JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world, and React is one of its leading libraries. “The leading vision was: If there was an HTML6 spec, and it was all about server-side apps, what would be in that spec? Unpoly is a polyfill for that imaginary HTML6 spec.” How Does Unpoly Compare to React? “This caused us to revisit server-side rendering and progressive enhancement, but this time invest a lot more work into pushing the limits with a structured approach, rather than piling up a mountain of unobtrusive JavaScript snippets,” Koch states. Koch notes that his team decided to take a deeper dive into their new hypothesis - that there had to be a way to improve their JavaScript coding while simplifying an already complex language. “While a few apps benefited from a heavy JavaScript approach, we weren’t so happy with most of the others, especially with the amount of code and duplication that a SPA approach required.” “When Angular made a major compatibility break between versions 1 and 2, we took the chance to review our SPA work from the past years and came out with mixed feelings,” Koch continued. We had been struggling with the limitations of server-side rendering, and we hoped that SPA style apps would allow us to deliver more ambitious UIs with less convoluted code,” he said. “Basically, when SPA frameworks came into fashion in the early 2010s, my team went all-in on AngularJS for a while. Unpoly was developed by Koch as he noticed the growing complexity of code being used to create web applications, and how most of the time it wasn’t necessary.


It sends HTML over the wire, and no JSON API is required.

Koch describes Unpoly as “an unobtrusive JavaScript framework that enables fast and flexible frontends for server-rendered HTML views. Source: Unpoly What Is Unpoly’s Purpose and Why Was It Developed?
