I'm not a frontend developer and have not used react or any flux implementations as I'm not sure if they will do what I want. I'm trying to wrap my head around how to use react to render backend changes that are external to the client, ie changes by another user. I see how react works to handle the view when the client takes an action, but I'd like to render changes from the server/other users without long polling (similar to how meteor works with two-way data binding).
My solution was to create a pub/sub system on the backend that will push changes to the clients if they're subscribed to the appropriate channel. This could be accomplished by analyzing database queries/backend actions and their resulting changes as is done with Asana's Luna. My friend told me that I can simply do this with only using an implementation of flux. If he's correct, I must be misunderstanding what flux actually does. To me, it seemed that it only reflects changes based on the actions of the 'current' client.
You are right. Flux is simply a way to manage application state in response to different actions. How you would trigger those actions is out of its concern. pub/sub server in this situation is a right way to go. You can take a look at Firebase - google non relational database that has lots of SDKs for different platforms and can notify client of changes done by other users. But anyway it works as a pub/sub server =)