Show HN: Reacton – A pure Python port of React for ipywidgets (opens in new tab)

Hi, I'm an ipywidgets maintainer, which is a library for writing interactive widgets in the Jupyter notebook.

For our living, we help organisations create larger applications, and sometimes turn them into user facing web applications using Voilà.

Over time, we noticed that making larger application hit the same problems as web applications in the jQuery era (state transitions being the biggest issue).

To tackle this issue, instead of coming up with our own declarative UI solution, we implemented the React API in Python. I think it is fair to say that ReactJS has proven itself, taking away adoption risk.

Reacton is a pure Python library, that implements a similar API as ReactJS. Instead of rendering to the DOM, we render to ipywidgets. The ipywidget library then is responsible for rendering in the frontend (which could use ReactJS, Vue, or even jQuery).