Blog Category: React JS

React is a well-recognized JavaScript front-end library in the field of web development. It brings several advantages to the developers, hence making it an impeccable choice than the rest of the frameworks. React is used by both startups as well as large, reputed companies. If you’re just trying out the ReactJS framework or working on the core concepts, this blog will give you an introduction to the ReactJS features in detail.

What is ReactJs?

React is a JavaScript open-source, front-end library developed to create interactive and smooth user interfaces for web applications. It is used for building the application’s view layer. The view layer is responsible for revealing the application’s look and feel in the MVC (Model View Controller) architecture. React is managed by Facebook at present. If you are seeking for Reactjs development services, reach out to a reputed web application development company for availing of the latest services for your projects.

Top Reasons to choose ReactJs

The reigning popularity of React in the present day has cast a shadow on all the other front-end development frameworks. Here are the primary reasons as to why:

1. Creation of dynamic apps smoothly

Building dynamic web applications with ReactJs is simple. It requires less coding and provides more functionality, contrasted with JavaScript, where the coding complexity often increases very quickly.

2. Advanced Performance

The web applications built using React are faster as it uses Virtual DOM. It relates the early stages of the components and specifically updates items present in the Real DOM that were altered. This sets it apart from other conventional web applications that update the entire components.

3. Reusable Components

Components are the fundamental building elements of any React application. An individual app typically consists of several components. These components store the logic and controls, which can be used again throughout the entire application. It cuts down the application’s development time remarkably, which is an excellent asset to ReactJs development service and brings remarkable business results.

4. Unidirectional Data Flow

React follows a single directional data flow. It is useful because the developers often nest child components inside the parent components when developing a ReactJs app. So, since the data flow is unidirectional, it becomes less complex to debug errors and identify the exact location in the code where the problem happens in an application at the moment of occurrence.

Top Features of ReactJs Framework

1. JavaScript Syntax Extension

JSX is a Javascript syntax extension used along with React to refer to what the user interface looks like. You can write the HTML structures in the same file by making use of JSX, which comprises the JavaScript code. It helps to make the code easier to learn and debug, as it omits the usage of complicated JavaScript DOM structures.

jsx

const name = ‘easylearn’;

const greet = <h1>Hello, {name}</h1>;

The above sample code displays the way JSX is implemented in React.

2. Components

The functional components are stateless and consist of a render method. Data is derived from other components in the form of properties.

function Greeting(props) {

return <h1>Welcome to {props.name}</h1>;

}

The class components can easily hold and handle their state. They follow the particular render method approach for returning JSX on the screen. Hence, they are also referred to as stateful components, as they retain the state. Here is a sample code. 

 

class Greeting extends React.Component {

render() {

return <h1>Hello all {this.props.name}</h1>;

}

}

3. State

The state is a type of React object that contains all the data or information about the component. A component’s state can change as a responsible behavior to a user action or system-generated events. Whenever the component changes, it undergoes re-rendering, and changes denote the component behavior and the way it will render. You can go for ReactJs Development Services from the industry experts for getting desired business advantages.

class Greetings extends React.Component {

state = {

name: “Country”

};

updateName() {

this.setState({ name: “easylearn” });

}

render() {

return(

<div>

{this.state.name}

</div>

)

}

}

Wrapping it up 

React is JavaScript Friendly, and the usage of JSX syntax extension combines the functionalities of both JavaScript and HTML. As a developer, it is advantageous for creating individual components and combining them later on. It makes development easy for high-volume applications. The rendering performance is high, and it focuses on individual components. The developers can find it simpler to break down the complex UI into smaller components instead of working on the entire web app.

ReactJs framework is renowned for providing robust and innovative features. Thus, it is an apt framework for startups to invest in; make use of the latest features, and develop great web applications for their business growth. We are a Web Application Development Company, and we are available around the clock to assist you with your business requirements and merits of this popular framework.

ReactJS is an open-source JavaScript library that swiftly renders webpages, and offers an output that is highly dynamic and responsive towards the user input.

After trying out various technologies, Facebook settled down with ReactJS to speed up its news feed updates simultaneously with people using chat. ReactJS provided developers a platform for quick implementation. It significantly changed the development approach of Facebook.

The following are some of the significant advantages that ReactJS development can offer,

• The virtual DOM in ReactJS enhances user experience and makes ReactJS developer’s work quicker
• React components reusability significantly saves time
• Unidirectional data flow provides code stability
• An open-source library that is continuously developing and freely available to the community
• Redux offers easy and accessible state container
• Wide React and Redux toolset is available for developers

When it comes to hiring ReactJS Developers or ReactJS Development Company, the first important point to consider is selecting the one that meets your requirement. We have consolidated the essential basic criteria or the checklist that you need to keep in check before you hire ReactJS developers.

Explore the company

Go through the website, take a look at their portfolio and client testimonials. They speak volumes of the quality of work of what the company can offer to your project.

Domain Expertise

It is not mandated for every software development company to have experts in every field of technology. So it is good to go with a software development company with multi-domain expertise. If you are looking for AngularJS or ReactJS developers, it is advisable to go with a company that is proficient in Full Stack Development.

Experience

Confirm that the company has an experienced development team by having a look at their CVs. Conduct interviews if required with the concerned developer to know how they work and how proficient they are in that particular technology that you require for your project.

Time Flexibility

Inquire about the availability of the developers and their schedule and how far new updates are entertained. New updates received after commencing project development are chargeable in some companies.

Project Undertaken

Get to know in-depth about the projects that they have developed to ensure it is true. Also, you can get more ideas from the technical point of view to fine-tune your project.

Updation with technology

Technological improvisations happen now and then. So, developers are required to be updated to know the nuances of the technology that they deal. This knowledge proves beneficial during the development process as they can get the job done effectively and innovatively.

Coding Standard

Ensure that all projects are developed in adherence to the standard guidelines. Clean code is beneficial at all times during and after development for future enhancements.

We, Tops Infosolutions, are the best software development company in the USA. If you are on the lookout for ReactJS Development Company or to hire ReactJS developers, you might want to join hands with us. Talk to our experts to know the best price that we offer for quality development services. To reach us, dial: +1 408-400-3737

How would you define a picture to someone who is on the phone with you? A beautiful landscape may arrange the art of abstraction in the world of delusion, had art only this simple. As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But are pictures always so pleasant to look at? How about when a picture of your group holidaying in Hawaii randomly pops up on your screen while you’re checking Facebook between work-hours? Your boss did not approve the leave and now the pictures are destroying your day. Between criticizing overcrowded Hawaiian beaches on Facebook and making plans to quit the job, did you wonder (albeit while biting your nails) how Facebook manages to throw in the right picture at the right (or wrong) time.

Taking a Page from Facebook Manual of Development

Product development in software engineering field is somewhat complicated and product managers often see products from Facebook as the primary source of inspiration. But product managers aren’t the only people inspiring products from Facebook. Facebook intrigues software developers as much as it does product managers. Of course, what goes in Facebook stays in Facebook (cough cough!!!). Lately, the social networking giant had been making many of its development technology open source; giving developers access to the same set of tool-sets and libraries that products managers there have been benefiting for a long time.

One of those tools is ReactJS; an open-source JavaScript library created by Facebook that has taken the world of web development by storm. On the surface, every large firm into building digital products or platforms often have their own set of internal development tools; not many see the day of light outside their development community. Even when they do as an open source development technology, they don’t see much adoption outside those inner circles. In that context, React leaves a validating distinction.

The technology, which forms a larger part of Facebook web development(frontend), has been a fascinating case for the global development community. The pace of its growth outside Facebook’s inner circles and the way it has taken web development by leaps and bounds; into JavaScript realm is the basis of the stories I am going to recite about three developers and their journey into JavaScript, full-stack development, and single page applications.

Netflix

In 2014, LG gave an extinct mobile OS a new phase of life. LG purchased WebOS, renamed it LG WebOS and kickstarted the era of smart TVs. The adoption of LG Smart TVs and thus LG WebOS grew exponentially. Netflix saw the Smart TVs as an instrumental vessel of growth and was among the first few major developers to build an application for LG WebOS.

The year was 2015, Netflix was growing in double figure and they wanted a development technology that could keep up with the pace. Netflix has been cross-platform to begin. Once upon a time, they had a client for even little PSP. According to Wikipedia, Netflix even runs on some Blu-ray players.

An integral part of brand identity is customer experience. If you’re selling thermostat with climate control, you want all your home users to feel the same level of comfort. The same goes for digital products, you want them to feel the same for users regardless the devices they are accessed from.

A television, no matter how smart it is, lacks the raw processing power and large memory of modern computers, tablets and smartphones. They were not built to render complicated web apps and load Fortnite. Their rudimentary browser may struggle to pump out enough strength to simplest of DOM manipulations. Netflix initially experimented with their web app in wrapped inside native LG WebOS package, the UX was choppy at best. Netflix tested some changes exclusive to smart TVs but they were a little too much departure from Netflix UI. Then they created Gibbon. As Ian McKay puts in Netflix techblog titled, “Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React”

“In 2015, we embarked on a wholesale rewrite and modernization of our TV UI architecture. We decided to use React because its one-way data flow and declarative approach to UI development make it easier to reason about our app. Obviously, we’d need our own flavor of React since at that time it only targeted the DOM(blame JavaScript). We were able to create a prototype that targeted Gibbon pretty quickly. This prototype eventually evolved into React-Gibbon and we began to work on building out our new React-based UI.”

New York Times

NYT4, the fourth and longest living version of nytimes.com died in March, 2018 after serving New York Times content for 17 years. NYT4 was built in Context, a programming language invented by NYTimes engineers for internal development.

With NYT5, NYTimes taking a more open approach to development technology. For example, their updated desktop and mobile websites are coded in PHP and Node respectively. NYTimes CMS, Scoop still captures a substantial part of the website.

Despite all those existing technology stack, the NYTimes software developers were struggling in three departments:

• Obtain credentials for multiple web services
• Write an HTTP client (for the umpteenth time) to talk to said services
• Create my view layer, probably from scratch, because there is no real central repository for NYT components

No so coincidentally, they ended up with ReactJS. As they put in their technology blog Times Open in an article titled, “React, Relay and GraphQL: Under the Hood of The Times Website Redesign”.

“Relay is an open source project by Facebook that exposes a framework they have been using internally for years. It is the glue that binds components written in React to data fetched from a GraphQL server. Relay is written in JavaScript; and we are using it as the basis for our new website’s codebase to power our desktop and mobile versions as one on Node.”

Relay acts as a partner to GraphQL and React. A top-level query usually happens on a route — a URL pattern that loads a component when it is matched.

Ever since, web developers at NYTimes are in love with the JavaScript library. This Oscar they leveraged on the single page application side of ReactJS. New York Times has designed a great new project that simulates different looks of stars on Oscar red carpet. Obviously, this project’s interface was built in React and lets users filter the gallery of different photos from 19 years in a nice way. The re-rendering on this project is only one of the impressive features we can thank ReactJS for.

Justin Heideman backs these reasons up in his blog post on NYTimes Open, stating that:

Within our app we create lightweight, single responsibility Stores. A Store is responsible for managing a particular data request.

What About You? The Future is ReactJS

While many big names in the world of startups and technology are attaching their name with React, the JavaScript library brings the real benefit to small and medium enterprise trying to transform web experience for their users. It’s not us; you check any blog, publication targeting SMBs and startups and you won’t find a single reference to frontend developers without ReactJS.

ReactJS has become conspicuous to frontend development and if your website runs on any other technology. I would suggest an introspection into your web development efforts or your competitors if you are skeptic. Future websites will run on ReactJS and if you wish your website to remain competitive, you got to move to the latest technology which is now reminiscent by ReactJS.

Your Trusted ReactJS Development Company

If you are looking for React developers and engineers; we, as a leading React.js development company, has the right experience and competence in the development technology. If your definition of front-end engineers doesn’t complete without mentioning React developers, you can leverage on our React expertise for next application, new development or migration. You can also hire React js developers on flexible engagement models to facilitate migration from obsolete technology AngularJS for example.

Writing about ReactJS at my organization makes me curious to look into the daily workings of our React.js team. I pressed the idea to some of my teammates with little skepticism, who got the validation from the team lead. The lead passed the request to the management and voila I received an invitation the next day.

Breaking Down the Agenda

The invitation was from Team Alpha or our go-to team for any sort of React development. The invitation email had all the details about the project and agenda of the day.

Team Alpha includes a number of React veterans, everyday web developers, and erstwhile AngularJS developers. Evidently, they are the first in line to adopt a project that has the word “AngularJS” and “migration” in the scope. Luckily, they had adopted a new project on the day. A team meeting was called and I was on the invitation list.

The blog is my attempt to showcase how we, at TOPS, approach technology migrations, particularly AngularJS to ReactJS migrations. It is the result of spending a day with the leading ReactJS development team at TOPS and many more following meetings. Before discussing the day, let me give you a brief about the project.

The Project: Origin and Broken Trust in AngularJS

When I say they adopted a new project, I did not mean ‘new’ in the strictest form. The project I am talking about was an AngularJS application. The same old story: Google is pulling the plug off AngularJS and businesses with interests in AngularJS are keenly looking for new home for their application.

The application we were supposed to migrate from AngularJS to ReactJS was a part of an enterprise suite. It was an employee-centric application and created 8 years ago. The employee portal was client’s first interest into AngularJS and JavaScript realm. The whole prospects of single page applications made the client excited while their management was already drawn to the hype. A little push from a consulting firm and they built an innovative web experience for their employees.

A Smooth and Focused Transition and a Funny Client Call

Application migrations often mean rewriting the entire application from scratch. At the meeting, nobody wanted to spend months rewriting the entire codebase in ReactJS. We had a fun argument with the client and somehow we convinced him otherwise. At TOPS, we have a strong client-centric culture and we didn’t want to slow down too much on our mission. Additionally, it is a high risk to rewrite everything about an app without testing the water.

It was decided each week Alpha Team would meet for a developer exchange meeting at a conference room, where they will share learnings, brainstorm ideas, but also take larger undertakings. We discussed and decided on the idea for the migration strategy and allocated a sub team of erstwhile AngularJS developers to develop and present the migration strategy.

Redefining the Migration Strategy: Technicalities and Logics

A frontend application is actually a set of HTML documents featuring an edifice of nested HTML elements. Likewise, modern web applications trend to feature an edifice of nested components. A streamlined replica of an application showing a list of comments from employees may look like that:

The analogous component tree looks like this:

After deciding the migration strategy, the rest of the day passed contemplating complexity replacing and rewriting this tree. This step got a little technical. I will try to explain in as approachable terms as possible but…

The main Application component is wired up with complex logic like routing. The routing is deeply integrated with the main components and a key piece of AngularJS. NavItem is friendlier. It displays a link, has some trivial logic like “am I ready” and displays anchor text.

The content part of our app contains sub tree showing a list of comments. The ComponentList is complex, as it is attached to the data layer and may retain state: what item is selected etc. The Comment is the easiest part of that tree. It essentially renders a Comment and handles user interaction. The Text component for example is responsible for rendering the text. That component will render in another technology without hiccups

Our conclusion was this that the more you advance down the component tree, the easier it becomes to swap components. For the remaining time, we established the guidelines and looked at elements for that migration strategy. Here are some of the highlights.

Key Guidelines to Migration

• What about new features?

We decided we will built new features in ReactJS & Redux.

• What about existing code?

If possible start to migrate leaf-first up to a whole component tree until you hit the routing module. If you touch old code/ components, estimate how much it would cost to rewrite it, if less than 30 minutes, rewrite, and else get a second opinion.

• What is the simplest way to migrate common UI components?

The rudimentary building blocks of a web app are standard, reusable UI components, like Drop downs, Buttons, Forms etc. They are essential to build new components with React.

Re-write generic UI components when you need them, and let other devs know that they now exist. Use that chance to improve the design/ UX.

Developers at Facebook created ReactJS, a JavaScript library. Facebook grew too big too fast and soon it was too big for its boots. By early 2012, its user base was already approaching 1 billion users, more than any website ever in the history of the web, and its developers faced problems never encountered before in the history of web development.

At that time, PHP was the mother tongue of web applications and Facebook had already pushed it to its limits. As we know, “Necessity is the mother of all inventions”, the developers at Facebook created React and inspired many similar applications to follow the same path. Around the time Node.js came around and JavaScript replaced PHP as the mother tongue of web development.

While AngularJS was around a while before Facebook came up with React, it was too much similar to MVC web frameworks of those days, more like JavaScript (on Rails). AngularJS was too HTML-centric, and front-end development relied too much on templates. Templates have always been synonymous with dynamic web development.

An Era of Single Page Applications (SPAs)

However, that was an era of single page applications (SPAs), a type of web application that loads a single HTML page and dynamically update that page as the user interacts with the app(read mobile apps on your browser). While SPAs look very convincing on paper, their development isn’t cakes and chocolates for web developers: HTML templates don’t go very well with dynamic page updates. We all know the “curse of DOM manipulation” synonymous with JavaScript development. Not to mention, too many roundtrips to the server is a costly affair when you are entertaining a billion users.

Soon React became the center of web development at Facebook to connect its 2.5 billion users. Taking a cue from the social networking giant, today, React is the reason for the existence of social media features in thousands of applications and of course, standalone social networks. Of course, JavaScript developers are looking at React with a keener eyes for future social networking app development.

Why Not Social Networks on Dynamic Websites?

If you remember, Facebook started as a plain-old dynamic website and gradually moved to a single page foundation. I mean it wasn’t feasible to run millions of concurrent users on a yet-another PHP website. Imagine your WordPress website with ten thousand pages, you will quit before I finish this blog. Your server-costs will skyrocket because of too many user requests. Just imagine if a user likes-unlikes a photo, it will count as two server round trips. Simultaneous processing of millions of requests means you have to run the application on a supercomputer of a server and you’ll end up paying thousands of dollars for hosting. In case you compromise on either, you will irritate your users with a bad user experience. You don’t want either of the problems; you don’t want your social network to be a dynamic website.

Social Networking on Single Page Application

Unlike in a dynamic website, user requests don’t load a fresh page in single page applications. Upon a user’s request, only a part of the single-page changes. That is, if a user likes a photo, then the ‘thumbs up’ sign will highlight without refreshing the page. This will save a number of server round trips to and from your single page application, cutting costs. But single page applications don’t miraculously turn around the fate of your application. The “curse of DOM manipulation” will only multiply when you enter JavaScript development domain. There is a reason Facebook had to develop React when AngularJS was thriving as a web technology and actively supported by Google (well that might be another reason).

Building Web Applications with ReactJS

As aforementioned, React was created because the erstwhile web technologies weren’t up for modern web application development like SPA development. AngularJS was revolutionary because it brought web development under the realm of JavaScript. While it solved many problems associated with traditional web technologies, it brought problems never heard of before.

React had a fresh approach to JavaScript development. It brought features never heard of in web development. For example, ReactJS employs a virtual DOM. Nobody thought of DOM as a virtual element working in-between DOM and the applications. Developers could care less as long as web technology freed them from the curse of extensive DOM manipulation. It’s not just virtual DOM, there are many features to React that make building UI a painless experience. But a social networking app is more than UI and we probably need more than a JavaScript library to build such apps.

The Various Features of Social Networking Apps and ReactJS

If you have been using one or more social networking apps, then you know you’re repeating the same set of actions in different states of the application. If I attempt to brief the most common usage of social networking apps, it will be Like-Unlike photos, uploading photos and videos, and chatting.

In the rest of the blog, I will take each of the app features into consideration and highlight how they are better to implement with ReactJS while taking into account the benefits of React I mentioned in the blog:

1. Like-Unlike Photos

When you ‘Like’ your friends’ photos on Instagram, the ‘heart’ turns red the very instant. The same goes when you ‘Unlike’ the photo. On the web, such instant Likes/Unlikes are only possible with single page application and React builds uncomplicated single page applications. Downwards data binding makes way for predictable states by making parent states immune to child states. That is when you tap a photo, it zooms in but the action won’t zoom the layout of entire applications. This may be a rough example but I guess you get what I mean to say here.

2. Uploading Photos and Videos

Did you remember those days when you have to upload a photo on a website? They used to show you a dumb GIF animation, indicating the progress of the file being uploaded. Nobody liked it but a workaround was impossible because there was no way around to upload and ping the server at the same time. ReactJS made it possible thanks to Async Await in React.

3. Real-time Chatting

You can build a real time chat app in React with Node, Socket.io and Express. Socket.IO is a JavaScript library and enables realtime, two-directional communication between web clients and servers. It has two parts: a client-side library that runs in the browser and can be integrated with React in a few lines of code. Then there is a server-side library for Node.js. Socket.IO is event-driven.While Socket.IO uses the WebSocket protocol, it has additional features like broadcasting to multiple sockets, storing data associated with each client, and asynchronous I/O.

Why Should You Develop Your Next Social Networking App in React?

ReactJS changed the dynamics of web development and raised the expectations of users from web app. They want the applications to look and feel like apps on their iPhones and Androids. Also, they want instant time and event based responses. Not to mention, social media applications are known for entertaining many users at a time. Did I mention scalability? Let’s take a look at why you should choose React.

• Rapid Development

If you have been using Facebook and Instagram, you know how often they bring new changes despite having a near monopoly. The demands of users are constantly evolving. The era of yearlong development cycles is long gone. If you can’t introduce a new version of app every month, you won’t stand a chance among your competitors. Therefore, rapid development is what you need with your social networking app goals.

Unidirectional data binding makes way for predictable application states which cuts chaos around web development. Developers tend to spend more time adding new features than figuring out the application. There is a reason so many developers are choosing React+Redux for build social networking applications

• Components, rather than Templates

I have been an advocate of HTML templates for a long time. Then React came around and now I find them intimidating to work with when developing single page features. Let’s say, on the fly, photo editing feature integrated into the application. With templates, we that features would be a nightmare to implement and you probably have to develop a custom web component to encompass the feature.

React use components so that you don’t have go through those bad dreams.

• Unparalleled Scalability

While this has more to do with the single-threaded, non-blocking architecture of Node, React and Node are match made in heaven. Theoretically, Node.js can partake infinite number of requests in its event loop without showing as sign of slowing down. Somebody said, social networking apps have to handle too many concurrent requests.

• Better User Experience

Since React and virtual-DOM free JavaScript development from the curse, your applications won’t be limited by extensive DOM manipulations. As a result, you applications would be much more responsive. Your users will relish this seamless user experience.

• Search Indexing

Your social network should have excellent presence on search engines such as Google and Bing. However, search engine spiders can’t render JavaScript yet and will return a blank page. You don’t want that to happen. Google, of course, will not index a page, which is blank to its crawler.

Lack of search engine optimization is a huge drawback of client side rendering. Not to worry though, ReactJS has first-class support for server-side rendering.  Server-side rendering of JavaScript returns a pre-rendered HTML page for ready-display to the browser. The crawlers can crawl HTML as would any other web application. So next time your user search for their friend on Google, you page should be first on the list with their bio.

Hire React developers at TOPS to build your Social Networking App

Thousands of businesses around the world trust TOPS to take their JavaScript development efforts to the next. They hire React developers for their experience in Redux, JSX and ES6 and expertise in social networking apps.

• Experienced JS Developers

We have a team of expert JavaScript developers who have been writing React application for quite some time now and ready to take any challenge you will throw on them.

• State-of-the-art development center

Our offshore development is a subject of envy for our competitors. At TOPS, we believe imitation is the best form of flattery.

• Various Engagement Models

Our engagement models are as flexible as your project wants it to be. Talk to our engagement managers and they will show the best way of engagement.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is React JS so popular?

React JS development is based on JavaScript, the world’s most popular language. It is simple to use, readily supported, and helpful for the rapid development of UI essentials. It has a virtual browser that helps developers to perform testing. It also uses a virtual DOM for quicker, lighter, high-performance apps, which enable it to be a popular choice for project planning phases.

Can React be added to an existing project?

As React is a library, it can indeed be used with an existing project. Once the set-up is done, add the React and DOM script tags to your existing HTML code. JavaScript file needs to be called, and a div tag needs to be placed with the components name as id.

Does React support gradual migration?
React is designed to make migration easy to adapt. You can utilize only the required features, and on the due course, you can add more React features to your codebase. Popular companies like Netlify have migrated from other JavaScript libraries/frameworks to React, phase-wise.

Which companies use React?
React is used by many famous companies like Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Whatsapp, Khan Yahoo, Academy, Codecademy, Airbnb, Microsoft, Dropbox, Slack, Atlassian, Storybook, and much more.

With more than 1,300 developers and over 94,000 sites utilizing ReactJS, it won’t be an overstatement to call React the future of front-end development. After all, Fortune-500 companies like Facebook, PayPal, Uber, Instagram, and Airbnb utilize this JavaScript based UI library for a major part of their applications’ front-end development on web as well as mobile.

Before React arrived

When React came, AngularJS was the only major contender in the JS framework space. While Angular was most complete framework (it still is), it was a nightmare for developers. They had to do a lot of coding, and with a steep learning curve even for seasoned JavaScript developers, AngularJS was never the most desirable way to build JS applications. It has too many functionalities that most developers need.

React isn’t a framework

Then came ReactJS and it revolutionized the way web applications are developed. However, React isn’t a MVC framework unlike Angular; it is a ‘view’ only library. That is, ReactJS doesn’t include state managers, routers and API managers in the core library. It may look like a limitation to you but for React developers, this is simplicity at its best because front-end development in React centers around the React ecosystem, not just the core element, which at the end of the day removes unnecessary complicacies.

React Ecosystem

Technically speaking, developers can expand what core React library can do by means of additional libraries. React together with those libraries form the React ecosystem. For example, there is Redux for state management, React Router for routing, and Axios to facilitate API interaction. Tens of thousands of such libraries are part React Ecosystem. Unlike Angular, templates aren’t part of React ecosystem. React doesn’t use templates rather…

React uses Components

This may turn out quite a no-brainer for most web developers and those looking to develop React applications. Just like not being an MVC framework has its advantages, the depreciation of templates also does. If you look closer, HTML templates restrict the set of abstraction you can include in your UIs.

There is a reason React is called the best library to build UI. The way it approaches building user interfaces is unique yet approachable. ReactJS breaks UI into independent, reusable pieces, and isolated components. This is how you define a component ‘Welcome’ in ES6.

Moreover, you don’t have to write down every component while building an application in React. There are many component libraries available in the React ecosystem: React Material-UI, React-Bootstrap, React Belle, are some of them.

All these awesome UI tricks may make you think otherwise; don’t they bog down performance of the resulting application due to extensive DOM manipulation we are subjecting it to? That’s a valid argument but did I mention Virtual DOM?

Note: DOM elements form the part of an application the user sees.

The Virtual DOM

Extensive DOM manipulation is a known bottleneck to a web app’s performance regardless how fast the client platform and the JavaScript engine is.

If you look at the image above, DOM has tree like structure and simple change on the top level may take some time to reflect on the lower levels. This may delay UI responses and ultimately hurdles with the user experience.

Fortunately, React solves the problem with a layer of Virtual DOM between the user layer and actual DOM. Virtual DOM is a virtual representation of the DOM,and it stays on the memory rather than user screen. So the question arises, what goes on the user screen then?

Note: Virtual DOM is conspicuous by its absence on Angular

An algorithm keeps a track of the changes made on the virtual DOM and determines which changes must make it to the real DOM and, thus, user screen. Let’s say the application contains a few React components with their own logic and rendering. Since React is fundamentally JavaScript, a single change in one of the components will manipulate the entire DOM, which if happens frequently may affect the performance as I described above.

This is where Virtual DOM comes in. It absorbs any change to the DOM and keeps it to the memory. The algorithm then detects on which component the change was made and updates that part of the DOM. This change will reflect on the user screen without disturbing the other components.

In ReactJS applications, only the component changes not the entire page to a user response. That means, the page URL remains the same regardless of user interaction. So how can you make the page discoverable to search engines?

Server Side Rendering

Server-side rendering your React app to output HTML content

React needs Server-side rendering to deliver an HTML response when a user or crawler hits a page URL. We handle the requests on the client side and render the React components on the server.

A major problem is Google crawlers can’t yet render JavaScript. That is the crawler will return a blank page upon rendering a block of JavaScript code. To make React pages understandable to Google Crawlers, we need server-side rendering for React.

With server-side rendering, React will render JavaScript pages with same consistency they do HTML and XML pages. Better SEO will ensure your web application is more discoverable by search engine and return a better value.

JSX and Final Thoughts

The idea of mixing JavaScript with HTML may sound intimidating at first. Purist web developers even feel guilty on mixing those two.

JSX is actually a syntax extension to JavaScript, which is like template languages except it comes with the full power of JavaScript. React, as I described in the section above, separates concerns with components rather than putting markup and logic in separate files. Of course, React doesn’t require JSX but it acts like a visual aid when working with user interfaces in JavaScript that no React developer tends to ignore. It also allows makes debugging easier with useful error codes and warnings.

Frankly speaking, whether JSX is an initiative in good direction is matter of great debate. While it makes coding way simpler when compared with Angular, people debate that it violates the fundamental rule of programming, separation of concerns, which is a bad coding practice in the first place.