React really doesn't give you any way to handle communication between components besides going downwards, which is fine because that solves a lot of problems.

React really doesn't give you any way to handle communication between components besides going downwards, which is fine because that solves a lot of problems. You can very easily implement his 'subscribe' scenario in React. In fact, in 0.14 they are planning on having observe[0] to help you do just this. Now, for my little plug. I've been working on Reapp since launch building a couple real-world apps and I agree that React needs an observe/subscribe model. In fact, I fell onto it while exploring a number of different patterns, and it's stuck the best. We launched reapp-kit[1] (in beta) a few days ago. It unifies a router, immutable data, and a simple action system that lets you implement flux as well as sideways data loading almost no time. And it's all run through React's awesome contexts[2]. Here's a video of me writing a sideways actions in React, in seconds, using reapp-kit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FALQU-pVKJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FALQU-pVKJo [0] https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/3398 https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/3398 [1] https://github.com/reapp/reapp-kit https://github.com/reapp/reapp-kit [2] https://www.tildedave.com/2014/11/15/introduction-to-contexts-in-react-js.html https://www.tildedave.com/2014/11/15/introduction-to-context...