React is a great tool for building user-friendly interfaces quickly. It is JavaScript-based library for building dynamic web components. Facebook created React more than 10 years ago. It was primarily used to manage news feed. Thanks to React, users are able to see changes – new comments, posts, notifications – without refreshing the page.
In this article, we will discuss React and practical reasons behind its popularity.
Simplicity
React is very simple to learn. Its templating language JSX looks just like HTML. The process of building user interfaces with React is very similar to building static websites in HTML. Despite similarities between the two, JSX allows you to implement dynamic features more easily.
To embed JavaScript expressions in React applications, you need to wrap them with a pair of curly braces. That way, JSX knows how to interpret JavaScript expressions.
Easy to start
Basics of React are really easy to learn. Advanced concepts take some time, but you can learn basics to create a simple web application in one day.
Because of its popularity, there are plenty of free tutorials for building web apps in React. Documentation for basic concepts is quite good and often updated.
Ability to reuse code
Like other front-end frameworks, React allows you to create components to represent one small visual or functionality of your website. Then you can reuse these components with different bits of data. You can use props to ‘feed’ specific data to the component, and fill the contents of that component with that data. For example, a design of an individual to-do task will be the same. But contents of it will be different. You can iterate over an array of objects in React and use data in each object to create new <Todo> components.
Supporting libraries
React is a popular library, so there are a lot of supporting utilities and libraries. These help React developers implement common features without manually doing it. For example, there’s a react-select library that provides a ready component for implementing select elements in React. As you can see in this article, setting a default value for react-select is much easier than it is for standard select elements.
Virtual DOM
This is one of the main React features. It allows React to display updates without refreshing the page. Whenever state or prop values change, virtual DOM will be updated to reflect those changes. React then compares virtual and actual DOM models and settles differences between them.
The entire React ecosystem (virtual DOM, state, props) allows you to design web apps with great user experience. Add features like scroll to bottom of the page when user clicks a button. Learn about how to do that here – https://simplefrontend.com/react-scroll-to-bottom/.
SEO-friendly
Despite what you might’ve heard, React can be quite SEO-friendly. Single Page Applications are entirely rendered in client browser, so they are not SEO friendly. However, there are plenty of services and technologies that allow you to use React with static site generators, or even for server-side applications. In these cases, you get the best of both worlds – React’s speed coupled with the SEO benefits and stability of static websites.
Community
There are a lot of experienced React developers out there. If you’re going to ask something on platforms like StackOverflow, experts are there to help you. There are also plenty of online guides posted about React and its features.