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Why is React so popular?
Frontend development using the React.js framework has become highly popular among top companies like Netflix, Airbnb, Instagram, and many others. The reason is that React can be used across multiple platforms, allowing developers to learn React once and use it to code for web, iOS, Android, and even desktop applications. In this article, we will discuss in detail the reasons why React stands out among all other frameworks.
Here are some of the reasons why react is most popular among all:
Component-based architecture: React for front end development is built around the concept of reusable components. Basically, you build a separate component first and reuse it everywhere needed making your app more scalable and faster to develop.
Virtual DOM: React.js utilizes a virtual DOM, which is an in-memory representation of the actual DOM. This enables React to efficiently update and render components by minimizing actual DOM manipulations, resulting in better performance.
Backed by Meta: React.js is maintained by Meta (formerly Facebook) and the library was open-sourced in 2013. Being backed by Meta provides React.js with significant resources, ongoing development, and support from a large engineering team.
JSX: JavaScript XML or JSX, is a syntax extension for JavaScript that allows developers to write HTML code within JavaScript, making it easy to bind the data. JSX (JavaScript XML) is a syntax extension for JavaScript that allows developers to write HTML code within JavaScript, making it easier to bind data. While it's commonly associated with React.js, JSX is not limited to React and can be used with other libraries or frameworks. However, React efficiently leverages JSX to enhance the development process.
Performance enhancement hooks: React provides various hooks like useMemo, useCallback, useEffect, and more, that can enhance your app performance and lessen the re-renders of the page from the state changes
Multiple frameworks: React offers multiple frameworks for different needs. React Native supports web, iOS, and Android development, making it ideal for mobile app development. React.js is used for creating web applications, while Next.js is optimized for SEO-friendly apps. However, there are other frameworks and tools available within the React ecosystem to address various requirements.
We have discussed a few points about React, and now we will discuss it in more detail.
Reusable component based structure
Reusable component-based structure is a very popular concept in web development these days, particularly within frameworks like React.js. This approach involves breaking down the user interface into smaller, self-contained building blocks called components. These components have both the structure and behavior of UI elements, promoting reusability and maintainability across the application.
You can make components out of anything and reuse them. That includes smaller components like buttons, mild components like carousels or layout grids, or even you can reuse pages as well for another route. Now React has 2 types of components:
Function based components: Function-based components are simpler and more concise compared to class-based components. They are written as JavaScript functions and take props as input, returning JSX elements as output. These components are primarily used for presenting UI elements and are stateless by default, although you can use hooks to introduce state and other functionalities.
Class based components: Class-based components are JavaScript classes that extend from React.Component. It is an older way of developing components in React. They have a render() method that returns JSX elements, and they can manage their local state using this.state. Class components have access to lifecycle methods like componentDidMount, componentDidUpdate, etc.
Companies are opting for functional-based components as they have more component optimization and easier syntax than class based components.
Strong Community Support
One of the main reasons to use React over other frameworks is that React has strong community support. If you get stuck somewhere, then you can always get a solution from someone online. Whereas for some new frameworks, if you hit a roadblock while developing web or mobile applications, you will have to figure it out yourself as it doesn’t have a large community backing it up. React framework has one of the largest and most active communities among JavaScript frameworks. This vast community comprises developers from various backgrounds and skill levels, contributing to its growth and adoption worldwide.
React is an open-source framework, and it has led to the creation of a vast ecosystem of third-party libraries, components, tools, and utilities that we can use in our React applications. Developers can leverage these open-source modules to enhance their React applications in any platform, streamline development workflows, and solve common challenges more efficiently. Popular repositories like npm, GitHub, and Bit serve as repositories for these modules, allowing developers to discover, contribute, and collaborate on open-source projects within the React ecosystem.
React has been a game-changer for front-end development, allowing developers to build complex and scalable user interfaces with ease while promoting code reuse and maintainability. - Taylor Otwell, Laravel Creator
SEO Friendly
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for websites and web applications, as it determines how easily search engines can crawl, and rank your content. While React doesn't provide any direct support to SEO, you can still leverage SEO by customizing or using a framework like Next.JS.
Here are the things you can do to enable SEO in a React app
Use Next.JS: Next.js, a popular framework built on top of React provides several built-in features that can help with SEO alongside the greatness of React. You can even have hybrid page models such as server-side rendering, and static page generation and you can even combine both. They provide several components as well which have incredible support for optimization and SEO. It is simple to use, some of them are Image (used to optimize images), Head (used for meta tags), and Script (used for script tags).
Server-Side Rendering (SSR): React applications are typically rendered on the client side, which can cause SEO issues since search engine bots may not be able to fully render and understand the content. Although these days search engine crawlers can crawl client-side apps as well, it is still not that great and still needs more work. Server-side rendering (SSR) solves this problem by rendering the initial React components on the server and serving the fully rendered HTML to the client. Next.js provides out-of-the-box SSR support, making it easier to optimize your React application for search engines.
Sitemap and Robots.txt: As with any website, it's essential to provide a sitemap and robots.txt file to help search engines discover and crawl your application efficiently. We can do the same in the React app to make it more SEO-friendly and expose the URLs to search engine crawlers.
One syntax for all platforms
In traditional web development, developers often had to write separate code bases for different platforms, leading to code duplication and increased maintenance overhead. React provides frameworks like React Native, which offers single codebase development for multiple platforms such as Web, Android & IOS, watches, and TV. With React, developers can build reusable components that encapsulate UI logic and functionality, and it can be seamlessly integrated into applications targeting different platforms.
Benefits of a single codebase development:
Write Once, Use Everywhere: Developers can write components once and reuse them across different platforms, reducing development time and ensuring consistent UI/UX across platforms.
Easier Maintenance: With a shared codebase, bug fixes, and feature updates only need to be implemented once, reducing the maintenance effort and time.
Cross-Platform Collaboration: Teams can work on different platforms while sharing a common codebase that maintains code consistency and seamless development.
Leveraging Platform-Specific Features: While sharing the core logic, developers can still leverage platform-specific APIs and features when needed, ensuring optimal performance and user experience on each platform.
Easy learning curve
One of the main advantages of React is its gentle learning curve, making it an accessible and approachable library for developers of all platforms. Unlike some complex front-end frameworks like Angular and .NET, React focuses on core concepts that allow developers to get started quickly and become productive with minimal overhead. It leverages JSX, which has HTML within the JS file that simplifies data binding.
The learning curve for front-end development using React is often described as a plateau, meaning that once developers understand the fundamental concepts, they can start building user interfaces with relative ease. The core concepts in React are straightforward: components, props, state, and the virtual DOM. By mastering these concepts, developers can effectively create and compose reusable UI components that can be reused across the entire application. It also has the advantage that you can “learn once, use everywhere”. React for front-end development offers multiple platform support by leveraging different frameworks built on top of React as we discussed earlier, we can build cross-platform Mobile apps and Web apps. Leveraging these React features, we can scale our apps with ease, and debugging is also easy as it has various community tools available for debugging. With the open-source code available, and various UI libraries like Mui, Mantine, and Chakra UI, we can leverage these to develop the UIs quickly and efficiently. Combining all of these, you can see why React has one of the best learning curves out there compared to other popular frameworks.
Conclusion
We have explored the benefits of using the React framework, currently the most popular front-end framework. React offers several advantages over other front-end frameworks and libraries, such as open-source code, a vast ecosystem, multiple platform development using a single codebase, and ease of learning. React provides additional functionalities through other frameworks built on top of React, like React Native and Next.js. While other frameworks have their strengths and unique features, React stands out as the top choice for most companies.
React is a great front-end framework utilized by Neointeraction Design's front-end development team. Our team of React front-end developers is well-versed in building robust B2B enterprise applications as well as B2C web and mobile applications. Contact us to hire react frontend developers from our team for your upcoming projects.
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