React.js & Web Components
These are interesting times for front end development. Google is pushing heavily on Web components and Facebook has released React. Google's also got The Polymer Project and is backing Angular.js. Not to mention javascript frameworks like Ember.js and full stack frameworks like Meteor or Google's Dart.
I've been wondering where all this comes together. Many of these projects have some overlap and it seems that even Google doesn't know where to focus.
So what's the future going to look like? I'm not the only one wondering. Read this blog post about Combining React, Flux & Web Components by @jareware for some good thoughts. You don't have to choose just one development stack, you can combine React with Web components.
Personally, I'm a big fan of React and we're using it for some parts of our front end in Skillhive. We rely heavily on Backbone but some of our more complex views are starting to look like spaghetti. React has helped a lot to get our front end code back in order. It's been easy to replace Backbone Views with React components and keep the models and collections intact. This allows us to gradully improve our front end code.
It's going to be interesting to see where we're heading! I'm sure component reusability in one form or another is going to be the future.