[rpeden]

React wasn't the first. :)

Some of us were out in the wilderness building GWT components back in 2009/2010. And although compiling to JS was a pretty weird option at the time, it mostly worked. Your app looked terrible if you just cobbled together GWT's default components, but if you built your own components with custom CSS, you could end up with a really nice looking application. We even used immutability and one-way data flow where we could, though it wasn't culturally ingrained the way it is in the React community.

I understand why GWT idn't become mainstream. Java was really disliked in the JS community, even more than it is now. But having a big, maintainable web app using DI and all other sorts of fun things was actually kind of fun 6-7 years ago. I like React and Angular 2 better now, though.