Chapter 1. What is Flux?

Flux is supposed to be this great new way of building complex user interfaces that scale well. At least that's the general messaging around Flux, if you're only skimming the Internet literature. But, how do we define this great new way of building user interfaces? What makes it superior to other more established frontend architectures?

The aim of this chapter is to cut through the sales bullet points and explicitly spell out what Flux is, and what it isn't, by looking at the patterns that Flux provides. And since Flux isn't a software package in the traditional sense, we'll go over the conceptual problems that we're trying to solve with Flux.

Finally, we'll close the chapter by walking through the core components found in any Flux architecture, and we'll install the Flux npm package and write a hello world Flux application right away. Let's get started.