Use Babel to transform JS

[zpao]

We're likely going to stop supporting JSXTransformer soon. Babel has something similar so it should be relatively easy to swap in, with the upside that more ES* features are supported and they are implemented and fixed faster.

[Daniel15]

I suppose this means I should close #131 and instead look at how difficult it'd be to support Babel.

[zpao]

Probably. You're welcome to use newer JSXTransformer (or even just browserify latest JSTransform, which includes JSX, directly), we just won't support it officially.

[don-smith]

+1 Babel integration would be excellent. It has good JSX support and heaps of ES6 features.

[Daniel15]

@locksmithdon You can use Babel with ReactJS.NET today via Webpack (see the documentation at http://reactjs.net/guides/webpack.html). This update would just be for when you hit .jsx files in your browser directly without using any other third-party tools, or use a .NET minification library (like Cassette or Microsoft's one)

[jslatts]

FWIW, we have been using Babel with ReactJS.NET and precompiling via Browserify + Babelify and gulp for quite awhile. We did it primarily for the ES6 transforms. Works great! I could write up a quick guide if there was interest.

[Daniel15]

@jslatts - There's some docs on Webpack (http://reactjs.net/guides/webpack.html) which I'm going to update to use Babel rather than JSXTransformer, but I'd be happy to add some docs for Browserify too.

The docs are in the same repo, the source for the Webpack one is here: https://github.com/reactjs/React.NET/blob/master/site/jekyll/guides/webpack.md

A sample project would be great too. Something like the current React.Samples.Webpack but for Browserify.

[Daniel15]

Mostly done in dd75222. There's still a few things I'd like to do (eg. allow configuration of Babel options) but the basic stuff is there.