Using React.js for your next project
Are you considering to build out a web application, or platform? If so, you may want to consider taking a look at the different technologies that you can use to build applications and platforms such as React.js.
React.js is a Javascript library that has become a large success for building out web-based businesses such as SaaS products, and other platforms. One attribute of React.js, is the ability to create great looking user interfaces (UI). Since HTML and JavaScript must collaborate side-by-side, React was created with an application-oriented structure by leveraging faster web-page load speed, SEO friendliness and code reusability through combining the two technologies.
The popularity of React.js
Facebook developed React.js in 2011 and further declared the open-source status in 2013 under the controversial BSD3 license. In addition, React’s Github repository has generated 96,000 stars from developers and has generated a community of almost 1200 active contributors. This actively growing library has many developers interest and is widely used across many web apps, and other platforms.
Many of the worlds top tech companies are using React.js to their advantage. Among the many companies that utilizing React, below is a small list of names you may know:
- Uber
- DailyMotion
- Dropbox
- Salesforce
- Netflix
- IMDB
- Venmo
Just to name a few!
How is it used?
The usability of the React.js library makes it easy to declare user-interfaces in self-contained independent components. Within these components, it hides its complex rendering engine with the implementation and shows a simple component API. If you wanted to manipulate the implementation, there are only a few public methods to override inside the component such as componentWillMount, componentDidMount, etc.
What are components?
The components are the building blocks that are used to create UI’s. This ensures there is no mismatch of multiple types to worry about. Since there is only one common object, it makes it easy to nest components inside components and encourages the principle of single responsibility for each component. This shows how reusable React.js components are. The more reusable the components are, the more development time this can save.
The creation of fast, scalable web apps can be accreditated to the virtual DOM (Document Object Model). Using React’s memory reconciliation algorithm, the library constructs a snapshot of the page, where it delivers the necessary updates before rendering the final web-page into the view of the browser. The Virtual DOM dramatically increases the speed of modern web applications since it eliminates the use of other code heavy frameworks such as Jquery. Faster is always better!
Easy integration
Because React.js is a library and not a framework, it can be used in association with other Javascript libraries which may already be in use. This means that you can quickly learn React.js compared to other comprehensive libraries.
The pros vs the cons
Although React.js is very SEO friendly, easy to test, reusable, fast for loading data, and easy to debug, there are some cons. React.js is view oriented, which means it has the view in mind when developing new UI’s over the logic. React.js will also require manual processing for data changes. Last, there are some cases where React.js may require more code opposed to other libraries.
There you have it, if you want your web application to be speedy fast, for both the end user, and development, you may want to consider using the React.js library when developing web applicaitons, or integrating with existing ones.