7 Reasons to Use React

With the integration of technologies within all aspects of our lives, more and more development platforms are emerging. The Web Application being the center house of all user-friendly interfaces; the developers are eager to get a hold on to the framework that ticks all the boxes like performance, speed, user experience, and utilization. React was released by Facebook in 2011 with the idea of providing developer a JavaScript library capable enough to transpose the user idea into reality with the component-based approach and simple to use Html usage.

Initially, React was being used by Facebook developers as a testing tool. Developers foresighted the problems faced by the developers, additions were performed, and React turned out to be one of the best JavaScript libraries for Web Development. Here are the top 7 reasons developers are using and must use the React framework to cover web development activities.

1. Effortlessness
2. Reusability of Components
3. Virtual Document Object Model (vDOM)
4. Flux and Redux
5. Developers Tool of Choice
6. Application Testability
7. Community Support

1. Effortlessness

As a web project moves towards an Agile approach, the fast pace development is need of an hour. The easiness of developing the component-based approach, JavaScript knowledge understanding, and lightweight libraries enables the developers to produce great web applications after going through days of the tutorial only. Simple structured code and minimal coding effort to achieve the requirements are compelling developers to design more and more websites applications using React.

2. Reusability of Components

The object-oriented programming’s initial idea is to break the development into chunks, which results in components. This is where React shows its real exquisiteness.  React provides developer component-based structure, which is reusable, resulting in less development time and effort. A simple way to understand this is to start with simple components like buttons, checkboxes, or dropdown.

These components later move into larger wrapped objects until a single root component is available for utilization. Each internal component has its logic written, and the rendering of the root component entirely depends on the internal component’s hierarchy and logic. An advantage of React Components is the utilization of these overall platforms resulting in the same output.

Below is a sample of a React component which is a button and has an onClick event.

function ButtonComponent(prop) {
 return (
   <button className="buttonTest" onClick={props.handleClick}>
     {prop.label}
   </button>
 );
}

The above reusable component can is used as below, which renders 2 buttons.

function handleAPICall(e) {
 // Do any API call
}

function handleFormReset(e) {
 // Reset form data
}

function App() {
 return (
   <div className="app">
     <ButtonComponent handleClick={handleAPICall} label="Submit"/>
     <ButtonComponent handleClick={handleFormReset} label="Reset"/>
   </div>
 );
}

Another beauty of React Reusability of Components is that every component built under a single project is available anywhere. Moreover, the entire root component built over minor components is re-useable, which saves the effort and time of the developer.

3. Virtual Document Object Model (vDOM)

No one likes the spinners while the data gets a load on a web application for a longer time. DOM is like a tree-shaped representation of HTML components within a page that is almost available in every front-end framework. Against each event like a button click or a form submit, the DOM updates itself instantly. A single page update means updating the parent and child elements within DOM.

The current state of the website loads into the browser always represents the current state of DOM; however, frequent updates over multiple elements cause multiple updates of DOM, resulting in slowing the website and offering poor user experience. React uniquely solves the DOM updating bottleneck by introducing Virtual DOM or vDOM.

The idea behind vDOM is to have a virtual representation of a real DOM. The vDOM in the system memory gets an update with every page element update. The vDOM gets compared to the original DOM using a set of reconciliation algorithms written under React Framework. This algorithm’s primary objective is to update the DOM with minimalistic steps to ensure smooth page rendering and transitional operations. This process under the React framework makes sure the page rendering is significantly improved and smoothen, providing a better user experience, thus resulting in high performance.

4. Flux and Redux

Facebook introduced and are maintaining the Flux architecture for their web applications. It collaborates with React components by ensuring Unidirectional Data Flow.

Source: https://facebook.github.io/flux/docs/in-depth-overview.html#structure-and-data-flow

The primary logic behind Flux Architecture whenever a central dispatched orchestrate creates an action to update stores; the views get updated accordingly as per the changes done to the store. The data shown by React Components are kept in stores without any duplication, unlike MVC Structure. This approach saves the development effort by keeping the model data in sync during the overall lifespan of the application. However, Facebook has not released the Flux library to the external world, and Redux is a reinterpretation of the Flux Architecture.

The only difference between Redux and Flux is that it uses a single store that acts as a single source of truth. It acts as a single object for a single application containing all the application data. Any alteration to the store data does the triggering of the relevant component to update itself in accordance resulting in keeping the screen in-sync with the data for every instance.

5. Developers Tool of Choice

The website is top-notch if it is compatible with all available browse and renders within the almost similar timespan. React development platform offers a wide range of browsers compatibility toolset, which aids the developer to encode the logic, whereas the compatibility related issues get internally handled. React Developer Tools and Redux Developer Tools can be installed as browser extensions. With strong debugging and inspecting elements features, React development provides dynamic libraries for developers to utilize and speed up the activities.

6. Application Testability

Testing the application during development plays a vital role in terms of efficient programming. React offers state-wise testing, which means that developers can open up a view at a specific state. This means all states of a single view is testable by just manipulating the state of function. All events, outputs, actions are executable as per the state and provide consistent output to encode the checks to avoid any possible exception. With the enhancement of the testing scale, the developer has trick upon his sleeves to take a preemptive decision before rolling out the web application for testing or deployment.

7. Community Support

One of the most exceptional reasons to utilize React for web development is the presence of strong community support, numerous tutorials, in-depth articles, and blog posts available to get through any issue. Being open-source, a large number of web developers makes React better day by day by adding up new and improved libraries. The official React libraries over Github has around 1900 active contributors and growing. Websites like StackOverFlow, Quora has excellent React resources available to tackle issues posted by developers with significantly less response time.

There are numerous other benefits compel the developer to opt for React Framework. This includes web and mobile applications development highly scalability, rich in content, non-risky, responsive, user-friendly, and advanced.