4 Reasons You Should Be Using React

The landscape of software development is constantly changing. New tools, frameworks, libraries, and workflows emerge in what seems like a weekly ever-changing development climate. One library, however, has been gaining popularity over the last several years. Companies can no longer ignore this technology. React, developed by Facebook in 2013, has been taking the development community by storm. It’s fast, versatile, and makes sense. If you aren’t using React to develop your applications, you should be and here are 4 reasons why.

What is React?

Simply put, React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. React makes the work of creating interactive, component-based user interfaces painless. The library only updates components whose data changes, which means your application only updates what is needed. Think of React as the view layer of an MVC (Model View Controller) application. React allows you to use the whole library, or just a small piece, to build your app.

Component-Based UI

React’s component-based use case allows you to create components that are reusable, composable, and stateful. Think of components as Lego pieces. You can start with components as small as buttons, check boxes, and form fields. You can then create larger components like complete forms and navigations. Once you build a small or large component, you can reuse it in multiple places within your app. The ability to build applications in this manner leads to a consistent look, great maintainability, and a better experience.

Performance

React updates the component state when data changes. React will respond to state changes and automatically update the DOM (Document Object Model). It uses JavaScript to render HTML, called JSX. React stores this virtual representation of HTML in memory, which is known as the virtual DOM. How does React only update what needs updating? React uses the Virtual DOM to generate an HTML tree. Every time states change, a new HTML tree is generated. Instead of writing a new tree, React only writes the difference between the new tree and the old tree. In addition, React is responsive, meaning it will conform to mobile, tablet or desktop formats instantly.

React Native

React also has a solution for imitating native applications on mobile devices. In a time where mobile apps are taking over the world, React Native is a leading solution. React Native allows the developer to create component based UI systems for mobile devices for both Apple and Android. There is no longer a need to be familiar with Swift in iOS or Kotlin for Android. Simply build your apps using React native. Bringing web based applications to mobile is becoming increasing popular since many users access information from their mobile devices. The only caveot to this solution is when you need to leverage the phone hardware such as the accelerator, GPS, camera or other components. React Native will direct you to integrate lower level solutions to work seamlessly with the phone hardware.

It’s A Modern Solution

React has been around for several years in a constantly-changing ecosystem. Big names like Netflix, Yahoo!, and Atlassian are using React. Netflix highlighted code simplicity, performance and modularity as the leading reasons they use the React library. It allows enterprises to craft apps with better user interfaces. The better the user interface, the more likely it is to keep users on their platform.

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