Why choose React for frontend development?
Before I dive into some of the cool things you can do with React, lets understand what is React.
React JS is basically a JavaScript library built and maintained by Facebook. React is an efficient, declarative, and flexible open-source JavaScript library for building simple, fast, and scalable frontends of web applications.
Language used to build React applications is JSX. JSX is basic JavaScript that facilitates HTML quoting and uses the syntax of this HTML tag to make subcomponents
ReactJS is a stronger framework because of its ability to break down the complex interface and allow users to work on individual components.
ReactJS comes with the core objective is to deliver the best rendering performance possible. Its strength stems from the emphasis on individual parts. ReactJS helps a developer to break down the complicated UI into smaller components, rather than operating on the entire web framework
Key benefits of ReactJS for front-end development
- Easy to Learn & Easy to Use : React, compared to other popular frontend frameworks like Angular & Vue, is much easier to learn. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons why React gained so much traction in little time. It helps businesses quickly build their projects.
- Helps to build rich user interfaces : React supports frontend libraries such as Bootstrap, Material ui, Chakra, Tailwind etc to build rich UI.
- Offers fast rendering : the DOM model is tree-structured. So, a minor modification at a higher level layer can awfully impact the user interface of an application. To solve this, Facebook has introduced a virtual DOM feature. Virtual DOM is the virtual representation of DOM that allows testing all changes to the virtual DOM first to calculate risks with each modification.
- Strong community support : Currently, React JS has attained [136,079 stars on Github] and 1,331 regular contributors. Not only that, but experts are also regularly uploading free React tutorials on Youtube and writing in-depth React tutorial articles & blogs on the internet. For instance, a simple “free React tutorial” search on Google gives 13,00,00,000 results. The latest survey by Stack Overflow also revealed that React is the most loved web framework, while Angular ranked 9th on the same list.
- Reusable elements : Technology used to be far more complicated than that, but ReactJS provides us with the ability to do just the same. Each React project is constructed using the so-called reusable elements. This means that by calling from other components, each element of the interface that you have already built can be used anywhere in your project.
Currently React is used by many fortune 500 companies
Airbnb, Tesla, Tencent QQ, and Walmart are among the top brands that built their mobile apps using the React Native framework.
React web framework, on the other hand, is currently being utilized by famous companies including Netflix, Paypal, NASA, BBC, Lyft, and New York Times to name just a few.
React Js inherits React Native which allows us to use the native look and feel to develop any mobile application(Android & IOS).
Like any other technology, React also has its flaws. The good news is that the number of them decreases month by month, year by year, and those left behind are acceptable in many cases.
- Incompleteness : It is not a framework and hence demands other libraries to be included, which may include learning curve as well.
- The high pace of development : Everything is evolving, and some developers are not comfortable with keeping up with such a pace. At the same time, we should admit that React’s core API has become more stable and rarely changeable.
- Lack of proper documentation : he problem with documentation traces back to constant releases of new tools. Different and new libraries like Redux and Reflux are promising to accelerate the work of a library or improve the entire React ecosystem.
Along with React we also have Angular2, Vue.js, Ember.js, Vanilla js, etc according to business requirements one can use suitable frontend framework.
