The web development process is largely backed by the back-end and front-end libraries and frameworks. It has become essential to use libraries for building high-performing and responsive websites and web applications. The high-paced technological world keeps giving birth to new libraries and frameworks every other day. In such a scenario, it has become quite a difficult task for businesses to go for the right set of technologies.
In this blog, we will discuss one such front-end library tool that is used by more than 10.8 million websites present worldwide. React.js, created by Jordan Walke at Facebook in 2011, is an open-source Javascript component library used to create intuitive user interfaces for websites and applications.
With the help of React.js, developers can create reusable UI components that can be quickly integrated, thus reducing the development time and providing a user interface that is responsive. How an app or a website performs depends a lot on user interfaces, and React is a perfect answer as it provides an extensive collection of UI components.
There are many other benefits of using React.js. Let us see in the next section why you should use Rect.js for your next web development project.
1. Component reusability.
React.js’ most significant contribution to the process of web development is that it allows developers to reuse components. With React.js, every web application component that you once created can be reused in any other project that is React-based and is compatible enough to integrate the element.
React.js components are bits of code that are independent and reusable. Input, in the form of Props, is provided and the component returns a rendered HTML element. These are called Primary JavaScript functions and can be used in any other project or even in other parts of the same app you are developing. This helps developers cut down time and cost as well.
2. Virtual DOM.
HTML and XML are represented in trees by an interface known as Direct Object Model or DOM. A DOM-like model is created by a web browser to render output where each element of the HTML code acts as a branch of the DOM tree. Any changes in the HTML code would require the DOM tree to be rendered again, which used to take a lot of time.
React Js developers found a permanent solution to it by introducing Virtual DOM, which gives blazingly fast rendering capacities to the DOM. Any change in the component’s state is compared with the existing DOM and React finds a feasible way to update the DOM in the background.
It may sound easy, but it is not. React handles the complete process seamlessly in the background. The benefits of Virtual DOM include faster development time and a remarkably fast and responsive application.
3. Flexibility.
React is an extraordinary flexible JavaScript tool that can be used to build intuitive user interfaces on a variety of development platforms. Not just components like Text, Label, Button, or Grid but React can also be used to build static sites using tools like Gatsby and Electron for desktop sites, which run on Mac and Windows.
React VR can be used to make virtual reality websites and 360 views. Besides that, the well-established community of React helps developers to handle server-side rendering and integrate advanced tech concepts into the websites.
React can also be used to add an extra feature to your existing app. Once any change is successfully integrated into your existing app or website, you can slowly migrate your app to React. Facebook did the same. You probably will not get such wide flexibility with any other front-end framework or library.
4. Increased performance with JSX.
Facebook introduced Javascript XML, or JSX, to integrate the functionalities of HTML elements into Javascript. You don’t need to separate JS codes and HTML while using JSX. React JS can be directly used with declarative HTML, which further is decoded by browsers to display the UI.
In the process, DOM trees are created and Javascript helps developers to modify the DOM to create interesting UIs. JSX also helps in fastening the DOM manipulation rate to a large extent. Virtual DOM and JSX together improve the performance and efficiency of websites and apps built on React.js.
5. Lightweight and easy to learn.
Another pressing reason to use React.js for your next web development project is that it is extremely lightweight and easy to learn. The highly-optimized development interface and simplified coding language let developers go for React.js 8 out of 10 times when given a choice.
With just a basic functional understanding of HTML-CSS and other concepts of programming, you can work comfortably with React. The documentation available online can come to your rescue when starting your venture with React. It has extensive documentation and online support in case you have stuck anywhere in the middle of the project.
As React deals with only the view layer of the web page, it is extremely lightweight.
6. Huge community support.
The fact that React is developed by Facebook itself is a testimony to how big the community of React is. At present, the GitHub repository of React.js has more than 189K stars and is one of the top 5 repositories. It has 39K forks on GitHub.
The NPM package of React witnesses millions of downloads daily, and the current week has witnessed an average of 15 million downloads. As of May 2022, more than 10K companies including Airbnb, Uber, and Facebook have reported that they use React.js in their projects.
The biggest benefit of having such a huge community is that in some cases you don’t even need to create an element as there are numerous components already created and are available online.
7. Easy testing.
Testing in React is just a cakewalk. Unlike traditional UI browsers, where browsers were needed for testing that were quite slow, you can swiftly test React components using the command-line of Node. You need minimal configuration as well as minimal time for testing in React.
There are numerous tools that can be used to conduct testing on React. Tools like Jest and Enzyme help write the test faster. Testing frameworks that you can use to test React apps are Mocha, QUnit, Jasmine, AVA, Tape, etc.
Conclusion.
The above points may have cleared the air if you were also in the midst of your decision about which framework and library to use for your next project. React.js is an extensively and widely used library and this makes the opportunity in this technology very huge.
If you are a business looking to create a web app smoothly and with loads of features, wait no longer to hire developers from India and start your project.
Alternatively, if you are a software developer, just keep brushing up on your JavaScript knowledge and that will do enough for your React.js journey as most of the businesses are leaning towards React.js for the above-mentioned reasons.
Leave a Reply