Support CDN'd / externally bundled React

[Jess Telford]

react-art is reaching into the lib folder of react and using internal functionality which is not exposed when React is bundled on its own (eg the cdnjs version).

See here:

var ReactInstanceMap = require('react/lib/ReactInstanceMap');
var ReactMultiChild = require('react/lib/ReactMultiChild');
var ReactUpdates = require('react/lib/ReactUpdates');

var assign = require('react/lib/Object.assign');

I would expect to be able to use a tool such as browserify-shim to indicate in my app that a global instance of React exists (eg; the cdn'd version on window.React). However, due to the references to react/lib/X, which are not exposed, it causes things to break.

When using browserify-shim with the following in my package.json:

  "browserify-shim": {
    "react": "global:React",
    "react-dom": "global:ReactDOM",
    "react-art": {
      "depends": [
        "react"
      ]
    }
  },

I get the error:

Error: Cannot find module 'react/lib/ReactInstanceMap' from '/Users/jtelford/dev/test/node_modules/react-art/lib'

---

How can we stop react-art from reaching into react/lib/X?

[Sophie Alpert]

React doesn't currently have an API to build things like React ART. Supporting this is a long-term goal for us but for now (and for a while to come), it will depend on these React internals.

If you want, you can build your own bundle using browserify that just contains react, react-dom, react-art, and then shim all three modules.

This isn't really actionable for us and won't be anytime soon so I'm closing it out, but we do want to resolve this eventually.

[Jess Telford]

Thanks @spicyj.

you can build your own bundle using browserify that just contains react, react-dom, react-art

Unfortunately we would only be using react-art for one small component out of a much larger, multi-page application and it would negate the benefits of using a universal CDN version of react (ie; browser cache).

This makes react-art unusable for us right now.

Keep up the excellent work, and hopefully we can re-visit in the future :)

[Sophie Alpert]

https://github.com/Khan/react-build uses webpack to make two bundles for React and React ART – use at your own risk.

[Jess Telford]

Very interesting approach. For now, we've gone with straight <svg> elements as we no longer require IE8 support (yay) :)