React has become a very hyped-up topic among developers and there are innumerable resources that address and discuss its technical advantages. However, migrating to (or choosing) a replacement framework ultimately comes right down to marketing it to all the right stakeholders, including non-developers. There are only a few CTOs or PMs that would conform to a re-write simply because it’s the trendiest new framework, and there are many cases of several organizations burned by the frequent arrivals in JavaScript tooling, which sadly moves individual endeavours backwards as a byproduct of moving web development forward. This post isn’t an effort to open your eyes on ReactJS. It’s aimed to be a general summary of this technology and ways our web developers use it to provide benefits to our clients and improve their own skill set.
Adopters and competitors
React is an extensive library for building composable user interfaces. There is, of course, stern competition from several competing tools like Angular, Backbone, Knockout and Ember that do similar things, however, if it were to be compared, React was always designed to address business issues rather than technical ones. I’ll try to shortly outline why React is, in fact, a smart solution to improve many areas of your business.
Giants like Facebook, Instagram, AirBnB, Atlassian, KISSmetrics, Reddit, Salesforce, Twitter, Uber, WhatsApp, Yahoo (the list goes on) have adopted React for many of these similar reasons, so you might at least consider exploring what the fuss is all about.
Bring your Business risks to a minimum
[announce]
Great Business Stability
Presently React boasts around 570 contributors as of the date of writing this article, as well as a series of conferences along with getting updated regularly. The amount of hype around it quite staggering. Another major contributor to the cause is Facebook, with products such as Newsfeed, Instagram, Messenger, Ads Marketplace etc. allocating a range of dedicated engineering resources and loads of brainpower. Other frameworks don’t really seem to benefit from such an amount of care and investment. Just note all the large companies that have it in production from earlier.
Develop Efficiently
Performance
Out of the box React uses patterns that renders it somewhat hard to come up with poor code quality to boot, since it eliminates direct interaction with the DOM it doesn’t just replace associate existing view layer like AngularJS, but also additionally removes the necessity for a variety of dependencies like jQuery which may lead to a lower size of the final codebase.
Migration
React can be injected into a very limited section on any existing page notwithstanding of how it’s already been designed and functioning. Which is what permits developers to migrate as quickly or slowly as they’d like. However, it’s important to note that React needs a runtime library to run properly thus slower and gradual migration has a somewhat negative impact on page weight until deprecated previous libraries are deleted.
Code reusability
React is special in its ability to offer great performance in addition to a completely managed rendering cycle for its components; this dramatically improves individual developer’s efficiency. By setting up the creation, distribution and consumption of isolated reusable parts in a much simpler way, it enables developers to have more time to use and create common abstractions. It proves true for lower level parts like clickable buttons and higher level parts like drop-downs.
SEO
Improved largely by having a totally rendered page from the server to the browser. React was designed with this kind of optimization in mind. It uses Node to render on the client of the server. Similar tools do provide this server aspect for rendering, however, they need a lot of unstable hacks and a considerable quantity of developer support to keep up. React has the potential to modify build tooling and scale back maintenance budgets.
Improve your assets
Combine Technologies better
React mixes HTML and JavaScript following the principle that they go along all the time. Separating them is more akin to separating technologies than considerations. This idea is extended more to incorporate CSS, which removes a myriad of problems related to CSS development such as global namespace, and scope/variable isolation.
Improved Debugging speed
Browser Developer tools unique to React have been set up by Facebook in order to provide data regarding what exact section and what snippet of code was called on to generate every specific bit of UI. This facilitates the process of looking for errors and simply makes a developer’s life a little easier.
Easy to learn
As it’s now customary in most current tools, Models representing data and Views displaying data are wired along to provide rich UI interactions.
Usually, a modification in a model or view (a checkout page model for example) triggers a cascade of changes throughout different views that depend upon that data. In a large enough application the dependency network becomes overly complicated and may be troublesome to change on-the-go without introducing bugs that will surely suddenly arise. In React, data flows solely in one direction making the notion of views way more easy to understand.
Easier to test
React’s elementary abstraction, the component, takes in data and outputs an illustration of the Document Object Model with no further adverse effects. This allows developers not to rely on consumption, instead allowing users to create states in the DOM making React components easier to break down and test.
Finally, we can move on to more effective organization with
Quicker Onboarding
Having such an extremely small API combined with a declarative syntax and UI componentization makes it so much faster to welcome new developers aboard your organization. While also making it easier to switch technologies on an on-demand and per-project basis for a truly Agile approach.
