React JS — An Introduction

2 min readNov 4, 2023

“React is an open-source frontend JavaScript library that is used for building interactive user interfaces and single page web applications that primarily follows component based approach”.

History…

According to Wikipedia — React was created by Jordan Walke, a software engineer at Meta, who released an early prototype of React called “FaxJS”.
He was influenced by XHP, an HTML component library for PHP.

Features of React…

1- Virtual DOM

2- Component Based Approach

3- JSX

4- One way data binding

→ Virtual DOM:

Virtual DOM is a blue print or we can say that a copy of real DOM that is placed in the memory and synced with real DOM.
It passes only the updated state of the component to the real DOM and prevents the re-rendering of the entire component.
Due to this process, the overall performance of the application improves.

→ Components in React…

Components are the reusable bit of code that combine together to form the entire react application.
They are independent pieces of code and the entire react application is divided into these components.
They are the building blocks of react application.

→ JSX

JSX is Java Script XML which has HTML like syntax.
With the help of JSX, we can use HTML tags inside React.
It converts HTML tags into react elements.

import react from 'react';

function greet (){
   return <h1> Hello World <h1/>   //This is JSX.
};

In the above example, the function is returning the HTML tag <h1> that is nothing but JSX.

→ One way data binding…

One way data binding means that the data will flow only in one direction in react.
React does not support multi-direction binding.
Due to unidirectional flow, debugging becomes very easier in react.
The data usually flows from parent component to child component in the form of props.

Conclusion…

So, React is indeed a useful JavaScript frontend library that can be used to develop web applications with the help of various features that we discussed above.

Keep Learning !!👍
Thank You😀😀