React's technique is to break your view down into smaller, composable components. These components provide a render() method which specifies how the component w

React's technique is to break your view down into smaller, composable components. These components provide a render() method which specifies how the component will generate its markup. render() can either return normal DOM elements (like <div>s) or can return other components. When your data changes, the render() method is called again. We compare the old render()'d version with the new one and the framework determines the most efficient way to update the DOM. Often this will be faster than hand-coding it, as React knows about the entire state of the page and can do cool tricks like batching reads and writes. The way we're able to pull this off is by constructing a very fast, lightweight representation of the DOM which knows which parts are dirtied and which parts are clean. This describes angular, that's what angular does. Edit: Well it's similar to what angular does, the intent is the same, but it doesn't know the state of the DOM among other things. Because this rerender is so fast (on the order of 1ms for TodoMVC), we don't need the end user to explicitly specify data bindings. We've found that this is an easy way to build apps. Is this faster than angular? Benchmarks please!