5 reasons to use React in your project
What is React?
React is an open-source JavaScript library designed to build user interfaces in an extremely efficient, simple, and flexible way. It was created internally by the Facebook development team in 2011, specifically by Jordan Walke, and was made open source about 2 years later, in 2013.
Since then, it has become one of the most widely used front-end frameworks (or library, in this case) in the world, having been adopted by hundreds of thousands of companies, including Facebook and Instagram, as you might expect, but also Apple, Netflix, Paypal, Amazon and many others.
If you want to know why and if you should as well, here are 5 reasons to use React in your project:
- Development Velocity
When compared to other front-end frameworks React is very easy to learn, which is one of the reasons why it has gained so much popularity in such a short time. Any programmer with experience in JavaScript will find it very easy to get used to React as it is super intuitive to understand most of its fundamentals.
This is obviously a very important factor, as it not only allows companies to find talent in React more easily, but also allows teams to build projects quickly and efficiently.
- Flexibility
One of React’s greatest advantages is its modular design. Using a component-based architecture, it allows programmers to create reusable components anywhere in the application, which makes it much more agile, easier to maintain and scale.
In essence, it makes life a lot easier for programmers, as they don’t need to write or duplicate code in order to have certain functionalities in different places in the application, and whenever changes need to be made, they are only made to the component in question and not in multiple places.
It’s easy to conclude that all this flexibility saves a huge amount of time, as well as money in the long run.
- Performance
React is based on a one-way data flow model, or unidirectional data flow, which means that information or data runs from the top down, i.e. from the parent to the children, and not vice versa.
This translates into a lot of stability and predictability, but it introduced a problem when there were high-level updates to the tree, as these had a big impact on the layers further down in the application and consequently the performance wasn’t as good as it should have been, due to the large number of elements to update.
To solve this problem, the Facebook development team created the virtual DOM, which, as the name suggests, is nothing more than a replica or virtual representation of the real DOM. The virtual DOM is thus responsible for assimilating the changes that occur in the application, then comparing them with a snapshot of the virtual DOM, taken before these changes (and based on the real DOM), finally updating only the element or elements where changes have occurred in the real DOM, rather than the entire tree downwards.
This was literally a game changer for React, and when you look at the advantages and disadvantages of it, this is clearly one of the biggest advantages.
- SEO-friendly
Have you noticed how sometimes, when you search for something on Google, certain sites appear at the top? That’s because they have excellent search engine optimisation, or SEO.
React helps to build SEO-friendly applications by allowing, among other things, server-side rendering, dynamic rendering, the introduction of meta tags, and other functionalities. Sometimes it may not be extremely intuitive to work with these techniques or best practices, but when applied rigorously they guarantee that any application will have exemplary SEO.
- Community
Like other front-end frameworks, React also has a huge community behind it, which should always be one of the reasons for using or not using a particular technology, especially if you’re in the early stages of learning.
Over the years, this community has contributed greatly to React’s growth and supports thousands and thousands of programmers every day, both by answering questions on multiple platforms for this purpose and by producing videos and articles all over the Internet.
Conclusion
Given this main 5 reasons to use React in your project and many more I am not covering here, I must add that there are also some disadvantages. In fact, some of the reasons or advantages mentioned above can also be seen as disadvantages in some cases.
For example, the development velocity and updates that React is subject to obviously has implications for the creation of effective documentation that can keep up with these updates – here, the community has done a huge service to all programmers; another clear example is flexibility, since frameworks or libraries usually have their standards and general patterns for how programmers should write code and work with them, but in React, due to its extreme flexibility, sometimes certain development patterns can be less predictable than desirable, and can even differ from team to team, or project to project.
For all these reasons, always remember that the framework or library you should use for your project must be a well-considered decision, mainly because there are so many good options. Above all, you should evaluate the pros and cons of the options you consider to be valid, realise the potential of the team you are part of, be aware of the project in question and ultimately make the most informed decision possible. And you know what, if in doubt, React won’t let you down for sure!
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