React JS – Is It Really A Charismatic Frontend Maker?

Should you REACT? Or are you REACT-ing enough?

Front-end Development is one constantly blooming environment, and new development tools keep emerging on the frontline every day. Businesses often get confused while choosing between a bevy of available libraries and frameworks because each has its own merits and caters to specific needs. Until a couple of years ago, Angular JS used to be one of the most popular choices for front end development services. In recent times, TezJS - a Jamstack framework, has created a buzz in web development with its blazing-fast performance and unmatched user experience. The conditions changed graphically when developers found a more suitable option to build complex and robust front end architectures through various coding possibilities that React offers.

React JS, commonly referred to as React is one frontend development framework, or to be more specific a library that has found a favorite with developers around the world. In the world of custom software development, it is very important that tech-based companies experiment with emerging frameworks to augment their digital capabilities. With React storming into the picture, it instantly fell into a race with its predecessors like Angular JS and Vue JS.

As per reports, 42% of developers prefer React Native for building cross-platform applications. Click To Tweet

The advent of React in Front end development

It all started in 2011 when Facebook, the social networking giant, created React JS for web development while maneuvering its own platform. The brand was trying to integrate the chat feature in 2013, which in due course would be available on every page of the app ie. they planned to integrate the chat feature across the app experience. Here, they faced a couple of challenges:

• The asynchronicity of the multi-user I/O
• The unpredictability and uncontrolled mutation of the DOM

All early web apps faced one common trouble – the DOM race condition. A bug that the predecessors of React couldn’t solve.

React JS - The Game Changer

Compared to the alternatives of React.js, the changes this framework itself brought to the front end development environment are monumental – it practically changed how Java Script functioned. Those days, developers were pushing for MVC, MVVM etc. The React team chose differently; they decided to introduce a totally new architecture, Flux, in the sphere of JS front end ecosystem. The core idea was to separate view rendering from the model representation.

They realized that the simplest key to structure and rendering views lies in avoiding mutation entirely. For Facebook’s chat integration concern, the React team ideated two fundamental innovations:

• Making the component state mutable – They devised a provision that change of state for components were to be locked once set. The state changes do not affect the existing view; instead, they were to trigger a new view render.
• Making data binding unidirectional – The newly developed Flux architecture helped make data binding one-directional, thus controlling the mutation bug.

The ‘ deterministic view render ’ has been one of the most futuristic innovations to date by team React.

With 35.9% of respondents prefer React.js as web framework, it is slowly moving ahead to grab the top position of jQuery. Click To Tweet

What is React JS?

If the aforementioned tech jargon seemed to be too tech-heavy for you, let’s head to the most basic question and break down React JS for you!

React is an open-source, declarative, and flexible JavaScript library that developers love using to build scalable, simple, and fast frontend interfaces for single-page apps or multi page web apps. Built and maintained by Facebook, it allows developers to construct large web apps that can change data without reloading a page.

React can be used with a combination of several JS libraries and frameworks like jQuery, Backbone, or even Angular in MVC. The core functionality of React is developed in a way that it makes front end development fast, modular, simple, and scalable.

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React JS – The Features

It would be apt to say that React has brought back some long-lost changes in the development ecosystem. With the advent of new tech stacks, the development logic moved to the client-side. React brought back the much-needed server-side logic.

A couple of exclusive features make web application development with React JS the new favorite for developers:

1. Component-Based: A single React app consists of several components. This modular, component-based approach in React JS enables it to integrate and display the design schemes.

These are actually pieces of the UI; React JS segregates the UI into several independent and usable parts which can be processed separately.

React apps generally have two kinds of components – Stateless Functional Components and Stateful Class Components.

2. Declarative: React provides a great developer experience to its users, which in turn gives a good UX. The developers are able to build web apps faster and can more easily debug the screen or components when using React.

3. JavaScript Syntax Extension (JSX): JSX is used to develop robust user interfaces. Developers can write the HTML structures and JS codes in the same file, which makes understanding and debugging codes an easy feat since using the complex JS DOM structure can be avoided.

4. Virtual DOM: React has provisions of a Virtual DOM (VDOM) which enables easy manipulation. In the event when the state of an object is changed, the VDOM changes that individual object in the real DOM and not all the other existing objects.

5. Faster Performance: The VDOM enables the React JS-based web apps to run faster. Plus, React as a platform can be quickly downloaded, and even the configuration process is effortless. Its code-splitting feature reduces the load time for apps considerably.

6. One-way Data Binding: React’s unidirectional data flow enables a developer to nest baby components with the parent components. Because of this, a developer has better control over the web app since he knows the source of errors.

7. Backward Compatibility: The reason why most developers prefer using React for front end development is this functionality because it enables them to work on the software with older versions of libraries.

8. Easy Debugging: React JS has a large developer community that enables easy debugging of web apps. There’s even a small browser extension that can add the React tab in the developer tools option on Chrome. This makes inspecting the React components easier.

React JS Benefits

you feel lost in the framework jungle? It’s not unusual, especially because we have a strong lineup of front end frameworks that have a varied list of benefits. However, it is exceptionally tricky to choose the framework which caters to the specifications required by your web app.

Let us explore a few benefits that React JS renders:

React JS is Flexible: What we must remember is that React is a library and not exactly a framework. Thus, it can be used on a huge variety of platforms to build scalable user interfaces. Although React’s primary focus was to create easy components for web apps, with time and innovation, its use cases have multiplied. While React Native is used for building scalable mobile apps, desktop apps that run on Mac and windows can be built using Electron. While React VR supports the designing of virtual reality websites, developers can also create static websites with Gatsby.

React gives the developers the flexibility to integrate it even into existing apps because of its library approach, as it gives them the freedom to choose from different tools.

React Helps You Build Rich User Interfaces: To have a great user experience on your app, you need to design a great UI first. The more vibrant and seamless your UI is, the more users will be attracted to your app. React JS enables developers build brilliant, high-quality user interfaces with its declarative components – something that can be an easy recipe to translate business success.

React Offers a Huge Set Of In-built Component Libraries: The power of React lies in combining JavaScript and HTML, which in simple tech terms, we call JSX. Developers can thus access a bevy of third-party JS libraries that eases their web development woes. Here are some mature component libraries that can be accessed:

• Microsoft’s Fluent UI Library
• Google’s Material UI
• React Bootstrap
• React Router
• React Motion
• Redux
• MobX
• Jest
• GraphQL
• Express JS

React Is Component-Based: React enables developers to write reusable, custom components since it comes with JSX, which is an optional syntax extension. The key to web application development is having multiple components which have their control and logic. React enables components that can be reused multiple times during the app development and hence, considerably reduces the development time.

React Offers Fast Rendering: An app performance is directly linked to its structure. And DOM structures are extremely hard to manipulate. Thus, Facebook had devised a Virtual DOM structure for React Js, which helps in calculating the risk factor on the VDOM before initiating any real modification. React facilitates an in-memory cache data structure that can account for every change made and update on the browser. Although this allows the developer to write the code as if the whole page has been rendered, the React library renders only the components that have been actually changed.

React Allows SEO Friendly App Development: An app always ranks high on Google if it has a lower page load time and fast rendering speed. Because of its high rendering capability, React JS apps can help apps rank high in Google search engine results.

React Has Extensive Support and Resources: Since it is developed by Facebook, React is widely and heavily integrated into the Facebook app, website, and as well as Instagram. In fact, they have a use case of around 50 thousand React components. Also, the React team constantly keeps the developer community informed of its releases through a blog. Also, all changes in the React atmosphere is managed by Codemod, a command-line tool that automates changes to the codebase and replaces all old components with the new ones.

React Has A Stupendous Community Support: React being an open-source library, enables developers around the world to exercise the technology in various ways. Head to Github, and you shall find around 1496 contributors and around 173 thousand stars for React JS. This means because React is so widely appreciated, there are numerous tutorials, blogs, and articles that a developer can refer to. Additionally, the React community is super active and offers immediate redressal if any fellow developer gets stuck at any sprint.

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React JS – Where Can You Use It?

If you look at the history of React Js, you will know that Facebook has actually developed the React library for its own use. However, since the time it was made open-source, a broad spectrum of companies with several business niches have been using React.

Dashboards: A couple of features make React one of the best alternatives for developing futuristic dashboards. For any business portfolio, data visualization is one crucial aspect because the end-user needs to receive the data in an understandable format. React’s component-based architecture and component reusability quotient ensures that you can create modular codes. Also, its VDOM feature warrants that the iterations on components for data visualization is rendered fast. React’s invertible SPA allows quick downloading of the highly complex SPAs like that of a dashboard from the server seamlessly.

eCommerce: React doubles up as a best fit for eCommerce websites because of its component reusability. Once the developer creates a component, the same one can be reused several times throughout the app and thus help in saving time and money. Easy code maintenance makes React one of the best alternatives for eCommerce development.

Cross-Platform Mobile Apps: React Native can be used to build both iOS and Android mobile apps with ease. Once you integrate React to build a website for your business, on the next step when you decide to build an app, React Native will allow the developer to use the same methodology and architecture.

React JS-based web apps can effortlessly transition into mobile apps; all you need is to hire React JS developers with proven expertise!

Social Networks: Of course! After all, Facebook, the social networking giant, devised React in the first place. React aims at saving unnecessary ‘client to server requests’, thereby improving app performances. React SSR enables both client-side and server-side rendering and also benefits the SEO algorithm through GoogleBot.

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Some Sparkling Examples of React JS Development

A number of tech giants have been using React JS successfully for robust frontend development.

Facebook: The original developer, Facebook’s webpage is built using React while it uses React Native for the Android and iOS platforms.

Instagram: Instagram features like Google Maps, Geolocation, search engines etc. are built on React JS features.

Netflix: Credit the app’s startup speed, runtime performance, modularity, and other functionalities to React JS.

Whatsapp: The king of instant messaging accredits its UI to React JS.

Uber : Again, the geolocation and google maps integration works on this app due to React JS functionalities.

Other than these, Amazon, Dropbox, Pinterest, Shopify, and Twitter are famous names using React JS.

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Conclusion

We must remember that in the world frameworks and libraries, we cannot really hold one to be more potent than another. However, we can always determine if the iterations in any match up to our requirements. As a business owner, you may not always know which framework will yield maximum results for you; that’s when the right software partner steps in!

At Radixweb, as a famed React JS Development Company, we have guiding businesses of every scale towards futuristic tech solutions. In case you need any assistance in this regard, feel free to get in touch with us.