Benefits of React JS: the best reasons to choose it

Author: Olivia Cuthbert

React is taking over front-end development since a large number of applications have been developing in this library. The React community is growing day by day, and more and more conferences have been planning to do with React. At this point, you might be wondering what makes React so great that many people focus on it? There are many other tools with a similar approach, so why choose ReactJS over the others? What are the benefits of React JS? Let's take a look at the benefits of React JS!

We've been using ReactJS for a while now, and we see many benefits of React when using it in our customers' applications. Of course, we believe there are many other ways to solve the same problem, but let's explain why we boarded this train and why you should too, by making a few points.

What is ReactJS?

React is described, by the same team, as a library for building user interfaces. It is a JavaScript library created and maintained by Facebook. Yes, you read that right, by Facebook (more on the story below). So, what made React trending? Well, React is an efficient and flexible JS library used to build fast, simple, and scalable web apps.

How is it possible that a simple library has become so popular? You may have heard of ReactJS before because many people talk about it, many people use it, and many products with this technology. It's no surprise that Reacts has gained a lot of popularity in the few years it has been around and will continue to do so for a few more. React was developed by Facebook on May 29, 2013, to solve internal problems on the Facebook page. But eventually, it became open source so that the whole world could make use of the abstractions it provides and - in doing so - make applications richer.

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A brief story behind ReactJS

Facebook developed ReactJS in 2013; React was born to solve severe problems on their platform. They then decided to open up the library so everyone could benefit from what they had built. Depending on how you look at it, this might make many people feel good, as we have one of the largest companies in the world supporting the library.

We live in the 21st century, and the amount of things and information we have to process or work with is sometimes overwhelming. It has become more difficult for companies to make the right choice, while the UI/UX for applications has become a great necessity. Here's a hint: If you know how to provide an excellent experience to your users in a short time, chances are your sales will increase daily. If you still don't learn, read on to find the top benefits of React.

There are more than 1 million websites live that use React. Among them, you will find some market giants like Apple, Netflix, and PayPal. If top brands decide to turn around and implement ReactJS, then there must be some extraordinary benefits to this library.

Benefits of ReactJs

  1. Easy to learn
  2. Usability
  3. Create rich user interfaces
  4. Performance
  5. Community

Are you considering using React for your product? Are you a developer who has attracts to the idea of learning React? Whatever your purpose, I'm sure this blog will be of great help, which introduces the benefits of React in a web application and why it has become a growing trend.

Before I start talking about the benefits of React, I want to remind you that you can outsource your software development tasks to us. You can even adopt our Nearshore framework to get multiple benefits for your business!

1. Easy to learn

Its learning curve is easy, which is impressive compared to other popular front-end frameworks like Angular and Vue. What makes React so good is how it handles its abstractions, so you need to make sure you describe your interfaces and what you want. React will take care of the "how" to translate our descriptions into tangible user interfaces in the browser.

2. Usability

React makes things more accessible, and if you have some basic knowledge of JavaScript, it won't be a problem to use React in your web application.

As React is pure JavaScript, there are very few APIs to learn. After that, it's your JavaScript skills that make you a good React developer. There are no barriers; you can become a prolific developer in a short time. It's worth noting that React Native exists and allows developers who know React to develop mobile apps with pure JavaScript.

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3. Building rich user interfaces

React is a library for building composable user interfaces. Traditionally, user interfaces in a web application built with HTML directives dictate the amount of abstraction you may use. When a certain amount of data in your app changes over time, traditionally -with Javascript- you have to look at data changes and imperatively make changes to the DOM to keep it up-to-date. Usually, when you make many of these imperative changes, you'll start to notice how building the interfaces becomes messy and tedious.

React was built to provide a solution to these and other problems. First, it approaches building user interfaces differently by breaking them down into components, making it easier to extend and maintain the view. But what React excels at is how it manages data updates (the name may become obvious now). When one of your components is first initializing, React generates a lightweight representation of your view (what they call Virtual DOM) to create the markup and inject it into the document. When your data changes, the component's render method is reached again, and react differs this new representation from the previous one and generates a minimal set of changes to be applied to the DOM.

4. Performance

Have you ever had to deal with a web app that was so useful but difficult to use due to its complicated and slow interactions? One of the things that good apps do, besides providing a useful tool, is to provide an excellent experience to users to feel comfortable working with them. To enable such interactions, you need to work with the DOM, CSS, and Javascript. Depending on the number of interactions, the DOM can become complex and slow to manipulate to interact with the app.

Faced the folks at Facebook with this kind of problem, so they developed a solution to keep all those flashy updates in the visible part of the page without sacrificing performance. Using an abstraction known as Virtual DOM (a well-organized data structure to represent the actual DOM tree), they do partial and fast updates to the DOM and REAL time. The React API works so well with this abstraction that you don't have to worry about when and will do these updates when you work with React.

React seems a bit magical; remember that using React itself will not result in a high-performing app. It is a must to do periodic checks. There are tons of Software Development companies that can help you build end-to-end Software Solutions.

5. Community

One of the most substantial benefits of choosing React as part of your stack is that you have a strong community behind you.

This community has created many tools to complement React and solve specific use cases that you will face during development. React is also a technology with a wide variety of valuable resources to learn from. You can find a large amount of YouTube tutorials and several useful blogs to delve into further. One example of these great resources you can see is Epic React by Kent C. Dodds. He is well known in the community and offers a large amount of information that I think you will find quite helpful.

Conclusion

React and reasons why it's a valuable tool for teams right now are many benefits, but these we've seen are perhaps the most important. I honestly love ReactJS for the experience it brings to users and how we -as React developers- achieve that by doing what's more important. Learning and implementing React in your apps can be a big win, but be careful not to overuse it. Remember, there's always a place where the technology might not fit well.

If you've come to this point, let me say that you've seen all the benefits of React JS. Now it's up to you to decide React. Top react development companies in India help companies and startups develop a complete platform while implementing React. Feel free to reach out to them anytime you need anything related to React and several other web development services.