Why Should You Use React For Web Development?
React is a free and open source front-end JavaScript library for building user interfaces based on UI components specifically for single-page applications. Initially developed for Facebook and is now maintained by Meta and a community of individual developers and companies.
Let's discuss what makes React so great and why you should use it in your projects.
What is React Used For?
With React, one can design simple views for each state in your application. React will efficiently update and render just the right components when your data changes which makes your code more predictable and easier to debug. We can build complex UIs by composing encapsulated components which manage their own state.
What are the React Features?
The Virtual DOM:
Document Object Model (DOM), is a structured representation of the HTML elements that are present in a webpage. DOM is a tree data structure which represents the entire UI of your application. Whenever a change occurs in HTML, the DOM tree has to be rendered again which will impact the performance of the application.
React solves this using virtual DOM, which creates a copy of DOM maintaining cache memory every time a change is made. By doing this, only the part of HTML which is affected gets updated and later these changes are applied to the actual DOM. This makes the application faster and does not have to be refreshed for every change applied.
Reusable components:
A reusable component is a piece of code that can be used in various parts of an application. In React, you write your code as a component and then place it in more than one instance. With this we can improve scaling and also save time by ensuring less code is written, faster development, simple codebase and easy maintenance.
JSX (JavaScript Syntax Extension):
Also referred as JavaScript XML is a React extension to JavaScript language. JSX provides a structured component for rendering a page. It is similar to HTML and makes it familiar to most developers. JSX makes code easy and understandable. It is easy to learn if you are familiar with HTML and JavaScript.
Data Binding:
React uses one-way data binding or unidirectional flow of data, where data flows from parent to the child component using props. If we need to send data back to the parent component, we can use the callback function as a prop.
Components:
Components in react implement a render() method that takes input and returns what to render on the UI. Components in React are classified as: Functional and Class. A functional component is a plain JavaScript pure function that takes props as an argument and returns a React element (JSX). A class component is created by extending from React Component and includes a render function which would return a React element.
Fast Learning Curve
React is a lightweight library that only deals with the view layer of a web page. If you have a basic understanding of HTML, CSS and programming concepts, you can quickly start working with React. React offers a much cleaner, better readable, more comprehensive code.
Community support & open source
React is an open-source library created by Jordan Walke. It has a huge support of JavaScript developers who actively participate in discussion forums and also a large community of experts to solve any problems. Each community consists of many thousands of React users. Statically, React has more than 191K stars on GitHub.
Performance:
React uses techniques to minimize the number of costly DOM operations which are required to update the UI which improves the performance of the application. This leads to fast user interfaces without doing much to optimize for performance. React also offers several other ways to speed up the application.
In the context of development frameworks, size matters, because it is directly related to the application performance. React with 43K makes it remarkable.
Ease to test:
ReactJS applications are super easy to test. It requires very little or no configuration for testing. Test cases can be written quickly using tools like Jest & Enzyme and a wide range of testing frameworks are available, some popular testing frameworks are Mocha, Jasmine, QUnit, etc.
Conclusion:
React is a very famous and widely used JavaScript library around the world. It is an easy-to-use and highly productive JavaScript framework. With the increasing new web frameworks and libraries, React still holds its position with large web development shares today. React is simple, efficient, clean, and it cuts off a significant time from development which makes it easy to select React for web development.
Content Credit: Akhila Vinod Sattarpu and Hemanth Alluddla