Probably many have seen and heard about React. You can also find many job offers on the Internet. Therefore, if you are reading this article, then you are interested in learning more about what React is, its main characteristics, and what benefits it offers.
Let’s start with a little clarification, contrary to popular belief, ReactJS is not a framework in itself, but rather an open-source JavaScript library developed by Facebook. Its main function is to facilitate the creation of user interfaces in a flexible and versatile way. This platform does a great job of overshadowing other frameworks. And its main competitor is AngularJS. If you want to understand this topic in more detail, then we recommend that you refer to https://relevant.software/react-js-consulting-services/.
What is React for?
We can easily build SPA single-page web apps and mobile apps with React. This is achieved through a complex ecosystem of modules and tools that have been created to harness the full potential of this library and enable agile development. It also has very broad community support because its main driver is Facebook. Also, names such as BBC, Airbnb, Netflix, Dropbox, and many more are actively using ReactJS. This gives us an idea of its scope.
Let’s take a look at the main features that you can get using this platform.
Features of React
Like other Javascript web frameworks, React.SJ has a lot of core features that you might want to consider, namely:
- The composition of the components;
- Declarative and imperative development;
- Unidirectional data flow;
- Performance thanks to Virtual DOM;
- Isomorphism;
- Elements and JSX;
- Stateful and stateless components;
- Component life cycle;
- Ideal for demanding applications;
- Allows you to develop mobile applications.
Getting started with ReactJS
If you don’t want to spend a lot of time learning ReactJS besides reading the existing documentation, the best option is usually to use the create-react-app package, which will get you started very quickly and save you a lot of time.
To get an idea of what we are “missing out” when creating an application or website, we must follow a series of repetitive steps. If that’s not enough, we’ll also have to deal with package managers, task managers, builders, live reloads, and the like. Because of this, we lose all focus on the workflow.
This is where the create-react app comes in, which gives us everything we need to run an app with React but without having to spend time setting up tools.
Benefits of React
Although we have already talked about some of the important features and benefits of React. Let’s look at another important element that can significantly speed up and simplify the development process.
Virtual DOM in React improves user experience
When working with React, we can’t help but talk about the DOM (Document Object Model), and the logical structure of documents used in HTML, XHTML, or XML formats. The DOM works as a standard for displaying input and output data in a web application and is in the form of a tree. Web browsers use this model for their layout engines to translate or parse the HTML syntax that we can see in browsers.
The React team has been able to speed up updates with virtual DOM. Unlike other frameworks, ReactJS uses an abstract copy process. This way, even minor changes can be updated without affecting other parts of the interface. This is achieved by isolating React components and an optimized data structure in the library.
Allowing React components to be reused saves a lot of time
Another benefit that Facebook has introduced with React is the ability to reuse code components from another layer at any time, which saves a lot of time in our projects.
For developers, the ability to constantly reuse our code is always a powerful incentive. It’s pretty obvious: reuse is design efficiency. But in programming, this process is a little more complicated, and we cannot take it lightly. Thus, system updates often become a headache, as each change can affect the operation of other system components.
But here, React gives us a break from our worries, because all React components are isolated, and changing one does not affect the others. This allows you to reuse components that don’t change themselves to make programming more precise, ergonomic, and comfortable.
With React, you can easily and quickly implement any project. If you are not yet that strong in this platform and you need help, then we recommend that you turn to angular devs for help.