React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It’s ‘V’ in MVC. ReactJS is an open-source, component-based front end library responsible only for the view layer of the application. It is maintained by Facebook.

React uses a declarative paradigm that makes it easier to reason about your application and aims to be both efficient and flexible. It designs simple views for each state in your application, and React will efficiently update and render just the right component when your data changes. The declarative view makes your code more predictable and easier to debug.

A react application is made of multiple components, each responsible for rendering a small, reusable piece of HTML. Components can be nested within other components to allow complex applications to be built out of simple building blocks. A component may also maintain an internal state – for example, a TabList component may store a variable corresponding to the currently open tab.

Note: React is not a framework. It is just a library developed by Facebook to solve some problems that we were facing earlier

While building client-side apps, a team at Facebook developers realized that the DOM is slow (The Document Object Model (DOM) is an application programming interface (API) for HTML and XML documents. It defines the logical structure of documents and the way a document is accessed and manipulated.). So, to make it faster, React implements a virtual DOM that is basically a DOM tree representation in Javascript. So when it needs to read or write to the DOM, it will use the virtual representation of it. Then the virtual DOM will try to find the most efficient way to update the browser’s DOM.

Unlike browser DOM elements, React elements are plain objects and are cheap to create. React DOM takes care of updating the DOM to match the React elements. The reason for this is that JavaScript is very fast and it’s worth keeping a DOM tree in it to speed up its manipulation.

Although React was conceived to be used in the browser, because of its design it can also be used in the server with Node.js.

Features

JSX

In React, instead of using regular JavaScript for templating, it uses JSX. JSX is a simple JavaScript that allows HTML quoting and uses these HTML tag syntax to render subcomponents. HTML syntax is processed into JavaScript calls of React Framework. We can also write in pure old JavaScript.

React Native

React has native libraries that were announced by Facebook in 2015, which provides the react architecture to native applications like IOS, Android and UPD.

 

React-native is a mobile apps building framework using only Javascript. It uses the same design as React, letting you utilize/include a rich mobile UI library/ declarative components. It uses the same fundamental UI building blocks as regular iOS and Android apps. The best part of using react-native is to allow/adopt components written in Objective-C, Java, or Swift.

Single Way Data Flow

In React, a set of immutable values are passed to the components renderer as properties in its HTML tags. The component cannot directly modify any properties but can pass a call back function with the help of which we can do modifications. This complete process is known as “properties flow down; actions flow up”.

Virtual Document Object Model

React creates an in-memory data structure cache which computes the changes made and then updates the browser. This allows a special feature that enables the programmer to code as if the whole page is rendered on each change whereas react library only renders components that actually change.

Benefits

Simplicity

 

ReactJS is just simpler to grasp right away. The component-based approach, well-defined lifecycle, and use of just plain JavaScript make React very simple to learn, build a professional web (and mobile applications), and support it. React uses a special syntax called JSX which allows you to mix HTML with JavaScript. This is not a requirement; Developer can still write in plain JavaScript but JSX is much easier to use.

 

Easy to learn

 

Anyone with a basic previous knowledge in programming can easily understand React while Angular and Ember are referred to as ‘Domain-specific Language’, implying that it is difficult to learn them. To react, you just need basic knowledge of CSS and HTML.

 

Native Approach

 

React can be used to create mobile applications (React Native). And React is a diehard fan of reusability, meaning extensive code reusability is supported. So at the same time, we can make IOS, Android and Web applications.

 

Data Binding

 

React uses one-way data binding and an application architecture called Flux controls the flow of data to components through one control point – the dispatcher. It’s easier to debug self-contained components of large ReactJS apps.

 

Performance

 

React does not offer any concept of a built-in container for dependency. You can use Browserify, Require JS, EcmaScript 6 modules which we can use via Babel, ReactJS-di to inject dependencies automatically.

Testability

 

ReactJS applications are super easy to test. React views can be treated as functions of the state, so we can manipulate with the state we pass to the ReactJS view and take a look at the output and triggered actions, events, functions, etc.

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