Why You Should Use React For Your Front End Web Development

Nowadays, online presence for any business or organization is vital to its sustainability. Because of this, it has become crucial now more than ever to choose the right technology to develop your brand’s website. There are more web development technologies out there than ever before, each designed to meet different needs. Despite this wide range of options, React is one technology that seems to stand out, adopted by companies around the world.

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What is React?

React is a powerful JavaScript library that was released in 2015. It is one of the most used web frameworks among software developers. A technology like this does not just get as popular as it is for any reason. In this article we will dive deep into what makes React useful and why you should use it.

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Why should you use React?

You might be wondering why React.js is so popular and if you should use it too. Afterall, there are other options on the market like Angular and Vue.js. So, why React? Unlike Angular and Vue.js, React is a library. However, it is more than just a library because of three distinct features: React components, Virtual DOMs, and JSX.  It is these features that make React stand out from other development technologies.

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What are React components

Components are at the heart of React's design. Components are independent and reusable bits of code. It is easy to make changes to components because they are isolated so changes in one do not carry forward to others. A component can be as simple as a button or text, or as complex as an entire website. Every website or application developed using React is a culmination of these small individual components, usually nested within each other, each designed with a particular purpose in mind.

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Usually markup and logic for websites are in separate files, however in React they are grouped together using components. This means components have the ability to have states. Having states allows components to be rendered easily according to runtime data and logic that you create for that component making them powerful and independent. New components are continuously being added to React’s library and you can always create your own custom components. This gives you the tools to essentially build any kind of website you’d like with the right components and logic.

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React allows for efficient development time

Another great feature of React is that it encourages the modularization of applications through components. React makes it easy for components to be reused and interchanged since each component functions independently. This has many benefits. One of the benefits is that it allows React developers to increase productivity by not having to re-create each component from scratch. This is very useful for websites with many similar components like an e-commerce website. For example if you create a component that will occur in many pages, like a product display card, you can reuse it easily. Being a component allows you to use it like a template that automatically fills it with the data you provide. Additionally, if you want to test your application, React makes testing easy and user friendly.

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If you already have an application that was not created with React but you want to modify it to use React you can do so. For example if you just want to change a certain section of your application, you can simply swap out that section with a React component. This ability to change any part of your existing application, no matter the complexity of the part, is an important reason why React is at least partially used by many company’s front end web technology.

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React has great performance

In addition to the ability to simplify UI development through components, React also allows for great performance because of the combination of the Virtual DOM and JSX.

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A Document Object Model (DOM) is an interface for web documents that represents the page which your browser uses to change the document structure, style, and content. Whenever a change like an update to content or a user interaction occurs, the DOM interface must be reloaded. This can take a significant amount of time and energy and negatively affect user experience. This is where the React Virtual DOM shines. React uses a Virtual DOM to monitor the values of each component’s state by creating a locally cached copy of the DOM. Instead of reloading the entire DOM whenever a website component needs updating, React compares the existing DOM state with the latest DOM state and then finds the most efficient way to update the DOM so that only the components that truly need to be rerendered are reloaded. Using this same technology, React makes it so that if a certain component of your website has an error, only that component will be affected. All the other components of your website will remain unaffected. This allows updates to be quick and efficient leading to fast and responsive applications.

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The performance improvement is especially significant if your website demands high user interaction or if you've had complaints of lagging on your website. E-commerce stores for example usually have this problem. This is because e-commerce websites typically  have many components on their website that users interact with and that need frequent rerendering.  Oftentimes this can lead to lagging, bugs, and general unwanted website behavior because the entire website is having to be reloaded frequently.  React was designed for large interfaces with continuously changing data so it is ideal for websites like e-commerce stores. Using React compared to any other front end development technology has been shown to improve responsiveness, code stability, rendering speeds, and loading times.

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What is JSX

The virtual DOM is not the only thing that makes React have great performance. JSX along with Virtual DOMs increase the performance and efficiency of React. JSX is a syntax extension for JavaScript. JSX is used in React to write HTML and Javascript together in a Javascript file. This means you can use Javascript to write HTML and thus React elements and place them in the DOM. This makes writing React easier and it also makes rerendering React components using the Virtual DOM faster.  

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Learn Once, Write Everywhere

As React’s popularity has grown, so has its development ecosystem. New platforms have been released to develop mobile apps, desktop applications, virtual reality websites, and more. The best thing about these other platforms is that you do not need to learn something brand new to use each one. Once you learn React you can use these other platforms with ease because they were all built using the same concepts as React. This is an often overlooked advantage of using React as it allows your team to have the ability to create many different products without having to learn other frameworks. Development time of other projects can be reduced if you choose to develop only using React’s development ecosystem.

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React Has a Large Development Community

The last benefit we will discuss is the strong and vast community of React users and developers that offer guidance. React has a huge community of support groups that make sure any questions that people have are answered. You can be assured that there are plenty of online forums with React related topics. On top of that, there are full time employees that keep React bug free and provide thorough documentation for everything from getting started to guides on implementing new features.

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Conclusion

Using React for your front end development has many benefits like efficient development times, better performance, more development tools, and a large development community. If you want these benefits for your own website, then it might be time to join the more than 10 million and growing live websites that are built using React. If you have any questions about how to use React for your e-commerce store, contact us at hello@zyme.ai.

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