React was a very contentious decision among the Meteor community. We started off with Blazejs, which itself was based off of Handlebars. We liked the HTML-like syntax of Blaze and how nurses, doctors, and other clinicians could become familiar with it. However, the code wasn't very reusable and it was neither modular nor composeable nor testable, and became a major headache to maintain. React solves the problems of composeability and reusability and testing isolation, at the price of having worked the problem backwards and having wound up with a quirky syntax that runs within Javascript that looks similar to HTML but isn't. Nonetheless, React is quickly become a classic example of functional programming techniques, what with its' pure components. All in all, an enjoyable technology to work with that brings some sanity to front-end user interfaces.

We chose React on the advice of the Meteor Development Group, which acts as our upstream technical advisors. We had a prior investment in BlazeJS, due to it's optimistic UI, latency compensation, and real-time updates. However, the BlazeJS code wasn't composable and didn't lead to good reuse, as it was already overly abstracted. It also carried with it a lot of baggage from the default HTML DOM. We have enjoyed React's functional components, deterministic rendering, testability, composability, and widespread support. It's taken some time to get used to, but fits in very well with a functional programming style. We had also taken a look at AngularJS components, but they were always half-baked in comparison to the active React community.