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Comment by dmalik | Hacker News Reader

> design JS frameworks to not take over the entire application.

Facebook did just that with React. React doesn't have to be used only as a single page app. Use it for just a single component on a page if you want.

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Nobody does this in practice. Tooling, tutorials, frameworks, etc are all created around the idea that the entire application is an SPA with a single root element. I understand that it’s possible to do this in theory, and that’s why I said I want to see a framework where the idioms and best practices are geared for this kind of use.

I'd encourage you to give React a try for this use-case! I've done this exact thing -- slowly introducing React in certain places in a large web app -- and it's worked great.

You're right that tooling/tutorials are mostly geared towards SPA usage, but React itself is designed to work for both. You'll have to decide on a pattern for "bootstrapping" React in a given page or element, since there aren't well-established best practices, but after that it's smooth sailing.

In fact, that's one of the major contributors to React's success. It's so easy to integrate into an existing application. If you take any major tech company (that's existed before React) that has adopted React as their main framework, I will bet the majority of them are, to this day, running React in parallel with another framework (and many are running it WITHIN another framework).

In theory that's true, but I hardly ever see it used like that in practice.

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