The development of systems and applications is constantly evolving. Right now, thousands of developers are creating frameworks, libraries, and tools to help other developers achieve as much efficiency as possible. Often, these technologies are conceived within large companies, as side projects that seek to solve internal bottlenecks of technical teams. Some become such interesting solutions that companies decide to share them with the world. React is one such case.
React is JavaScript
A reference for anyone working with front-end development, JavaScript is the programming language that has evolved the most in recent times, consolidating itself as the most used by developers today. This growth is directly related to the “revolution” brought about by tools like Node-JS, Angular, and, of course, React. They make the work of React.js software developers easier and expand the use cases, even allowing the use of JavaScript in the creation of APIs and backend servers.
React is a declarative programming language
A declarative programming language is generally defined as the opposite of an imperative language. Nevertheless, what does it mean? Concisely, while the declarative is concerned with what the programmer wants to do, the imperative wants to know how to achieve the desired goal. That is a big differentiator – and a great reason to get involved with React.
React is flexible: everything is component
With this example comes the concept of components, one of the foundations of React. The way React works to create user interfaces (or User Interfaces, the UIs) is by breaking the entire application structure into components. If you have experience building websites, you may be used to having all the HTML code for a page in a single file. What React proposes is the opposite: to separate all the code into small parts (in different files), which behave like reusable components.
React is efficient
If there is any clear advantage that React brings, is in the way it works with the DOM (Document Object Model), and updates components according to their states. In a traditional JavaScript application, the programmer must be concerned with finding out what data has changed in order to change the DOM and the states of the created elements. This is a lot of work and not very efficient.
What React proposes is the creation of its own, more efficient DOM, in which the components live, which is better known as Virtual DOM. Therefore, every time a component is rendered, React updates the Virtual DOM of each component already rendered and fetches the changes. Moreover, since Virtual DOM is lightweight, this process is very fast.
React is mobile
Another great advantage of React is that, with the same knowledge used to create websites, it is also possible to create native mobile applications through React Native. Several companies, such as Wal-Mart and Uber Eats, already use the library to build their apps, which reduces the cost of production and allows them to leverage developers in a variety of environments.
React is loved
React is the technology most loved by developers. This is very important, as you need to feel good about the technology you choose to work optimally on your projects.