There are a few basic tenets to keep in mind that may help you build a good React application:
Your UI should be a function of the data
In many "jQuery soup" style applications, the business logic for the application, the app's data, and the UI interaction code are all intermingled. This makes these sorts of applications difficult to debug and, especially, difficult to grow. React, like many modern client-side application frameworks, enforce the idea that the UI is just a representation of your data. If you want your UI to change, you should change a piece of data and allow whatever binding system the framework uses to update the UI for you.
In React, each component is (ideally) a function of two pieces of data–the properties passed to the component instance, and the state that the component manages internally. Given the same properties (or "props") and state, the component should render in the same way.
This can be a bit of an abstract idea without concrete examples, so keep it in mind as we move on for now.
Don't touch the DOM
In React, even more so than other data-bound frameworks, you should try not to manipulate the DOM directly if at all possible. A lot of React's performance and complexity characteristics are only possible because React uses a virtual DOM with diffing algorithms internally to operate on the real DOM. Any time you build a component that reaches out and does its own DOM manipulation, you should ask yourself if you could build the same feature more idiomatically with React's virtual DOM features.
Of course, sometimes you'll need to access the DOM, or you'll want to incorporate some jQuery plugin without rebuilding it in React. For times like these, React gives you good component lifecycle hooks that you can use to ensure that React's performance doesn't suffer too much (or, in some cases, to keep your component from plain breaking).
Not manipulating the DOM goes hand-in-hand with "UI as a function of the data," above.
Invert the data flow
In a large React application, it can be difficult to keep track of which sub-component is managing a certain piece of application data. For this reason, the React team recommends keeping data manipulation logic in a central location. The most straightforward way to do this is to pass callbacks into child components; there's also an architecture developed at Facebook called Flux which has its own website.
Create composable components
A lot of times, it can be tempting to write a large component that manages several pieces of state or several pieces of UI logic. Where possible (and within reason), you should consider breaking larger components into smaller ones that operate on a single piece of data or UI logic. This makes it much easier to extend and move around pieces of your application.
Beware mutable data
Since component state should only be updated via calls to this.setState from within the component, it's helpful to be wary of mutable data. This is doubly true when multiple functions (or components!) might update the mutable object in the same tick; React might try to batch state changes, and you could lose updates! As mentioned in the comments by Eliseu Monar, consider cloning mutable objects before mutating them. React has immutability helpers that can assist.
Another option is to forgo keeping mutable data structures directly in state at all; the Flux pattern, mentioned above, is an interesting take on this idea.
There's a great article on the React site called Thinking in React which goes over how you might take an idea or a mockup and turn it into a React application, and I strongly encourage going over it. As a concrete example, let's take a look at the code you provided. You essentially have one piece of data to manage: a list of content that exists inside the container element. All the changes to your UI can be represented by additions, removals, and changes to that data.
By applying the tenets above, your final application might look something like this:
/** @jsx React.DOM */
var Application = React.createClass({
getInitialState: function() {
return {
content: []
};
},
render: function() {
return (
<div className="container">
<span className="header">jQuery to React.js Header</span>
<button className="add_button"
onClick={this.addContent}>Add Element</button>
<button className="add_button"
onClick={this.timedAddContent}>Add Element in 3 Seconds</button>
{this.state.content.map(function(content) {
return <ContentItem content={content} removeItem={this.removeItem} />;
}.bind(this))}
</div>
);
},
addContent: function() {
var newItem = {className: "added_content", text: "Click to close"},
content = this.state.content,
newContent = React.addons.update(content, {$push: [newItem]});
this.setState({content: newContent});
},
timedAddContent: function() {
setTimeout(function() {
var newItem = {className: "timed_added_content", text: "Click to close"},
content = this.state.content,
newContent = React.addons.update(content, {$push: [newItem]});
this.setState({content: newContent});
}.bind(this), 3000);
},
removeItem: function(item) {
var content = this.state.content,
index = content.indexOf(item);
if (index > -1) {
var newContent = React.addons.update(content, {$splice: [[index, 1]]});
this.setState({content: newContent});
}
}
});
var ContentItem = React.createClass({
propTypes: {
content: React.PropTypes.object.isRequired,
removeItem: React.PropTypes.func.isRequired
},
render: function() {
return <span className={this.props.content.className}
onClick={this.onRemove}>{this.props.content.text}</span>;
},
onRemove: function() {
this.props.removeItem(this.props.content);
}
});
React.renderComponent(<Application />, document.body);
You can see the code in action in this JSFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/BinaryMuse/D59yP/
The application is made of two components: a top-level component called Application, which manages (in its state) an array called content, and a component called ContentItem, which represents the UI and behavior of a single item from that array. Application's render method returns a ContentItem element for each item in the content array.
One thing to notice is that all of the logic for managing the values inside the content array are handled in the Application component; the ContentItem components are passed a reference to Application's removeItem method, which the ContentItem delegates to when clicked. This keeps all the logic for manipulating state inside the top-level component.
