What is React? These are its biggest benefits.

On the occasion of the launch of our new React Ordering Website we bring you this article in which we briefly explain all the benefits that this new platform brings.

What is React and the reasons why it is a great alternative for the development of user interfaces, or complete web applications on the client side.

React is a Javascript library focused on the development of user interfaces. This is how the library itself is defined and obviously, that is its main area of ​​work. However, the truth is that in React we find an excellent ally to make all kinds of web applications, SPA (Single Page Application) or even mobile applications. For this, around React there is a complete ecosystem of modules, tools and components capable of helping the developer to cover advanced objectives with relatively little effort.

React represents a solid foundation on which almost anything can be built with Javascript. It also makes development much easier, since it offers us many things already ready, in which we do not need to invest work time.

A little bit of History

React is a library initially developed by Facebook. Its creation was made based on specific needs, derived from the development of the popular social network website. In addition to facilitating the agile development of user interface components, the main requirement that React was born with was to offer high performance, greater than other alternatives on the market.

They found that the typical binding and double binding framework slowed down their application a bit, due to the number of connections between views and data. In response, they created a new operating dynamic, in which they optimized the way views were rendered in the face of changes in the application data.

From there they tested it on their social network with positive results and then on Instagram, also owned by Facebook. Later, after its release and encouraged by the positive performance results of React, many other top-tier web applications adopted it. BBC, Airbnb, Netflix, Dropbox, etc.

What is the purpose of React?

It is used to develop web applications in a more orderly way and with less code than if you use pure Javascript or libraries such as jQuery focused on DOM manipulation. Allows views to be associated with data, so if the data changes, the views change too.

The spaghetti code that is usually produced by libraries such as jQuery is intended to be architectural and the way to achieve this is through components. A user interface is basically created from a component, which encapsulates the operation and the presentation. Some components are also based on others to solve more complex needs in applications. It also allows you to create other application parts conveniently, such as tests.

Conclusion

React is a complete library, suitable for many different types of projects. It allows us an agile, orderly development with a maintainable architecture, focused on components and that offers us great performance.

Although React does not take care of all the necessary parts to make a complex web application, the series of components and diverse tools that we find within the React ecosystem, allows us to benefit from alternatives capable of developing anything that we could do with a complex framework.

We invite you to learn more about our new React Ordering Website, we are sure you will love it!