Based on Statista’s 2022 worldwide developer survey, ReactJS ranks as the #1 front-end technology among the most popular web development frameworks, collecting 42.62% of engineers’ votes. In this article, we are sharing why software engineers enjoy building web interfaces using React JS and how it can help business owners create top-class products for their users.
Why Use React JS for Web Development?
ReactJS is an open-source JavaScript library for developing web and mobile applications. Specifically, it is designed to render the view layer of an application. This means ReactJS is responsible for the UI of your software product.
You can choose ReactJS to develop single-page applications (SPAs) like Instagram or Facebook. It also works great for dynamic websites – Youtube and Google, and interactive software such as Uber and Zendesk. What are the advantages of ReactJS that made so many market giants choose it for their UIs?
Declarative views
All you need to do with ReactJS is to let it know what your view should look like. You don’t have to put down the detailed implementation flow. This greatly reduces the amount of code writing and leaves less room for bugs. This declarative approach also allows React to change the state of each separate component of the UI without affecting the other.
Components
ReactJS lets you construct your UI like building blocks, taking advantage of its reusable components. Each component corresponds to a piece of functionality on the UI – a button, a field, or a block of content. And you can mix and match them as ready-made pieces of code to create your unique page view. This saves a ton of time.
Compatibility
ReactJS is a LIBRARY. This gives you more flexibility than any framework by letting you combine it with other technologies in different ways. For example, add new functionality using React to your existing app written with another technology. Or start building your app with ReactJS and move on using additional frameworks and libraries that cover your other specific needs.
Many web apps now easily move their UIs to ReactJS from outdated or more complex technologies. With React Native and ReactJS, you can quickly boost your digital presence by going mobile through native mobile apps or PWAs.
This is what you can find on the official ReactJS page. But in reality, there’s more than that.
Benefits of ReactJS for Developers
In the beginning of this article, we mentioned ReactJS ranking as the developers’ favorite front-end technology for web development. In this section, we explain the React JS advantages software engineers cherish so much based on our own experience.
Low learning curve
Being a software developer nowadays means following all the latest technology updates and learning continuously. In addition, almost every new development project will require adopting the yet unknown. Under such circumstances, the easier and faster the technology is to learn – the better. The benefit of React JS is it’s easy to learn, allowing engineers to get down from theory to practice literally in weeks.
Community
Nothing can be more helpful in solving development problems than the community of professionals sharing their practical experience. As a software engineer, you can find a variety of ReactJS documentation, tutorials, and resources, including Facebook’s, in open access. An extensive developer community also means a plethora of available React components that are ready to use.
Rich toolset and ecosystem
Granted its remarkable popularity and applicability, another benefit of ReactJS is the extensive list of tools that developers can use to streamline their work. These include React Developer Tools, Redux Development Tools, Create React App, Storybook, React Sight, React Proto, and others. Furthermore, there are countless frameworks and libraries you can complement your ReactJS project with, such as Next.js, React Bootstrap, MUI, React Router, and React Testing Library, just to name a few.
Special features
React’s virtual in-memory DOM helps to ensure a fast rendering of changing elements to the app view. The JSX syntax makes it even better by allowing engineers to use HTML directly in React. With the Flux dataflow management pattern and Redux library out-of-the-box, ReactJS makes keeping the application data in sync painless. React Hooks simplify the development of more complex apps by reducing some extra steps in coding. Each of these features helps to solve certain coding problems and thus speeds up web development.
Benefits of ReactJS for Businesses
Obviously, by making life easier for ReactJS web developers, React brings benefits to the application development process and business owners as well. Let’s discuss how exactly React advantages work for businesses.
Application performance
If your web application is dynamic and interactive, this means it will change its view pretty often. The more changes – the more operational effort. Here come the benefits of React! With its virtual DOM solution, your app views will load seamlessly. In addition, your app will consume less CPU power and battery charge on your users’ devices.
Development speed
The component-based nature of React JS as well as its unique features, ecosystem, toolset, and a variety of compatible frameworks and libraries, allow software engineers to work quickly and effectively. Following the declarative programming paradigm, ReactJS also requires less code writing and offers a conceptual model for building an app which makes it well-suited for prototyping. These advantages of React JS will certainly give your project speedup.
Simplicity
One of the important parts of the software development lifecycle is maintenance. The more complex your software product – the harder it is to maintain. Software engineers, responsible for maintaining your React application or those onboarding your ReactJS project at the active development or maintenance stage, will be able to get the hang of the code relatively quickly and easily. For you, as a business owner, this benefit of React JS will mean less time waste and more reliability of your software.
SEO-friendly
Search engine optimization (SEO) should be essential for your website if you aim to promote it on the web. When a website is well-optimized, search engines see it as naturally relevant to the search queries of your target audience and show it to them among the top search results. As you may guess, SEO is not just about your website content but also its technical characteristics, such as page loading time, page adaptability, and user experience. With ReactJS, you won’t need to worry about these.
What You Can Develop Using React JS
As we’ve looked at why ReactJS is so popular and has so many benefits, the time has come to consider when to use React JS is best. And we think they are also the reasons why ReactJS can make a great match for your project.
E-Commerce Apps
Being one of the top applications for ReactJS, e-commerce applications can make the most of this library’s possibilities. Due to React’s atomic approach to viewing design and reusable components, you can customize the UI of your online shop or marketplace as much as you need. Plus, with the ultimate performance granted by ReactJS, your website will satisfy its users even during peak hours or big sale days.
Social Networks and Messengers
As we’ve mentioned, ReactJS was created by Facebook and it’s meant for interactive and dynamic user interfaces. And what can be more interactive than social networks and instant messaging apps? For such types of applications, most issues come with fast loading of the constantly changing content. ReactJS solves this problem with its lazy loading approach meaning content elements will load gradually, as users come to need them, instead of loading everything at once thus slowing down the page load time.
Media and Content Management Solutions
These solutions may include blogs, video or music streaming services, e-learning apps, entertainment apps, and even basic gaming apps. They’re also interactive and content-rich, meaning they need something like ReactJS to take care of real-time view changes, fast component rendering, and vast UI customization opportunities. Plus, considering the great competition in this niche, you will only benefit from the development speed React can give you.
Tracking and Productivity Apps
Task managers, calorie counters, reminder apps, fitness trackers, to-do apps, reading flow managers, budget trackers, and solutions alike are all about planning, organizing, and visualizing different activities and their progress. ReactJS has all the necessary tools for creating a myriad of such handy applications, ensuring they are fast, responsive, and user-friendly.
AR/VR Solutions
Augmented reality and virtual reality solutions have started to gain real interest as the Covid pandemic broke out and left us one-on-one with the digital world. Many businesses and organizations adopted it as a new way for effective communication with their customers. As Meta announced its meta world, we could assume that ReactJS also gained from it. Now you can jump on its dedicated library, React 360, which can be used along with ReactJS to add augmented/virtual reality to the user experience of your gaming, e-commerce, or e-learning solution. With WebGL and WebVR you’ll make it cross-platform!
Conclusion
In this article, we just briefly covered the benefits of using ReactJS for web development. To sum them up, we’d make three statements:
- If you’re a starter software developer, by going with React you won’t get disappointed and will get the opportunity to quickly get to practice.
- If you’re an experienced developer, ReactJS will give you the speed and ease of coding in addition to the rich ecosystem of useful tools and features.
- If you’re a business owner and choose React JS, you’ll benefit from the variety of application domains React can offer, the development speed of your project, and the performance and interactivity of your React application.
