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This page describes FlexJS for developers that have familiarity with ReactJS. If you are unfamiliar with RectJS, <<you can find out about it here>>. In particular, we'll look at the relationship between JSX and FlexJS.

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When looking through the myriad articles on ReactJS, it becomes clear that its fresh approach to UI composition allows developers to use many other frameworks to build their application. Just do a search for "ReactJS dialog" or "ReactJS pop-up views" and many solutions present themselves. But most, if not all, are awkward or cumbersome to produce.

With FlexJS there are also several techniques, but FlexJS offers a straightforward design and presentation method: states. The concept of a state in FlexJS is different than that of ReactJS, although at a conceptual level , they both imply the current state or setting of the applicationcomponent. 

In FlexJS, the UI is always in a state. That is, what you see on the screen is being shown through a filter that displays only those UI components which are allowed to be seen in the current state. An example makes this clearer:

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The component being developed is given two states: Normal NormalState and Login LoginState. The idea is that when in LoginState, you will see a dialog to ask for login credentials. In the NormalState, the dialog does not appear. This is achieved by setting the state on the definition of the Login container:

<js:Container id="loginBackground" includeIn="LoginState" className="LoginBackground">
    <!-- items in the login dialog -->
</js:Container>

By adding includeIn="LoginState" to the Container element, FlexJS will only show this component (and its children) when the application's state is set to "LoginState".  To display it, you just set the component's currentSate:

currentState = "LoginState"

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The two transitions - one for each direction (into and out of the LoginState), declare the use of the Fade effect to make the components in the LoginState fade in and out. Just the presence of the transitions and their connections to the states is enough to hook things together. The application just changes the currentState to LoginState or NormalState to make the login dialog appear (fades in) and disappear (fades out).

States and transitions can easily enhance your application's experience. For a complex example, look at the FlexJS Store demo that is packaged under "examples" with the FlexJS SDK.

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