Drupal to Adopt React JS framework for Administrative UI’s

Javascript Frameworks such as Angular, React and Ember etc. has been very popular in developing modern User Interface Architecture. WordPress community is already working on their new Gutenberg Editor which is based on React. Recently, Facebook dropped its patent clause from React and released it under MIT License. After this incident, Founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert has published a summary of his discussions with core maintainers at DrupalCon in Vienna on his blog. He made it official that Drupal Community is going to consider React for UI of upcoming versions of Drupal.

Buytaert's proposal has been a hot topic of discussion amongst Drupal community. Recommendations made by him during his keynote presentation in Vienna were to test further and research how Drupal’s user experience could be improved by using a Javascript Framework.

Two years ago Buytaert and team explored the possibility of adopting a JS framework and three frameworks Angular 2, React, and Ember was on the list. At that time Ember was Buytaert’s first choice because there was an issue about the patent clause in Facebook’s open source license (now removed as React was re-licensed under MIT License) and Angular 2 was not stable. However, Drupal community was not keen to select a framework at that time and Buytaert, in turn, ended up improving Drupal’s web service API.

Buytaert mentioned that they do not want to limit themselves to a specific Framework instead they are exploring a range of Javascript Frameworks and other members of different Javascript community who consume Drupal’s Web service API. He also shared an illustrative graphic showing his visions of Drupal supporting many Javascript libraries on the user-facing front end while administrative front end will be a standard and based on React.

He went on to say that even at this point of time we have not any clarity which framework is going to win in the future. We might not have the clarity in upcoming years as well. Javascript Frameworks will keep on evolving and take better shapes. Picking a single framework that would be the best would be a premature decision. Though, React is gaining more momentum today.

It is fascinating to point out that the discussion on the proposal has many similarities to the recent discussions in the WordPress Community about the use of React in Gutenberg. Many developers brought up the concern of those who come from PHP background and that it would be hard for them to learn React as more complexity is being added to the development process.

Drupal community is aiming to accomplish real-world testing before the development of upcoming version 8.6.0 gets started in the first part of 2018. The leadership of Drupal wants to begin the adoption in an incremental and limited way before the deciding on a framework so that the process could be reversible if they witness any better approach.