Use React JS for rendering

http://facebook.github.io/react has a model which I find much easier to grok for updating the DOM, essentially you pretend that you re-render everything on every change, but in fact React works out a minimal change-set.

This isn't pure yak-shaving as it does address some issues around recent activity popping when the components refreshed and some funkiness when you resized the window around breakpoints.

The manual serialisation to JSON is a temporary stop-gap on the way to creating case classes at the point we fetch the data.