The landscape of front-end development continues to evolve and change. New website development technologies are released on what seem like an almost daily basis. In an ever-changing environment like this, it’s become increasingly difficult for businesses to make the right choice for their website development needs.
In terms of front-end development, Angular and Vue have been two of the more popular choices for businesses, but now there’s another framework that’s really getting everyone’s attention: React. In fact, it’s done more than just gain some attention; React is now being adopted by more and more web developers in the commercial space. Why? For starters, React is fast, it’s easy to learn, and it’s simple to use. Read on to gain more insight about React, and about why it’s quickly become a top pick for businesses and brands everywhere!
So, What Exactly Is React?
The “JS” part stands for JavaScript. React is basically a JavaScript library that’s built and maintained by Facebook. According to its creator Jordan Walke, React is an efficient, declarative, and flexible open-source JavaScript library for building simple, fast, and scalable web application front-ends. There are already hundreds of thousands of live websites using React, including industry giants like Apple, Netflix, and Paypal, among others.
Key Benefits of React
React offers an impressive list of advantages over its competition. Below are some key benefits which help to set React apart from other front-end development frameworks:
- Speed – React essentially allows developers to utilize certain parts of their application on the client side, and others on the server side. By dividing resources in this way, it ultimately serves to boost the speed of the development process. In simple terms, different developers can work on individual parts separately in real time, without jeopardizing the integrity of the system as a whole.
- Flexibility – Compared to other front-end frameworks, the React code is more flexible and easier to maintain, thanks to its modular structure. This flexibility helps to save both time and effort, which also results in cost savings for businesses.
- Performance – React was really designed with performance in mind. The core of the framework offers a virtual DOM program and server-side rendering. If you don’t speak “tech,” what that means is that it can run complex apps extremely fast!
- Usability – Working with React is really pretty easy, as long as you have some basic knowledge of JavaScript. And if you’re an expert JavaScript developer, you can pretty much learn all the ins and outs of React in just a day or two.
- Mobile app development – If you thought React was for web development only, it isn’t limited to just that! Facebook has already upgraded the framework to enable capability for developing native mobile applications, for both Android & iOS platforms.
Why React Could Be the Best Choice for Your Business
Let’s say you’ve heard some good things about React, but you’re still not sure whether to try it for your next project. Here are some reasons why React is certainly worth your consideration:
- It’s easy to learn – As we’ve already mentioned, React is fairly easy to learn; simpler, in fact, than other popular front-end frameworks like Angular & Vue. Businesses can build their projects faster with React.
- It helps to build rich user interfaces – The quality of the user interface plays an important role in the value of any application. Having a high-quality UI will help your users to love using the app. React allows for building just such UI through its declarative components; see the next point below.
- It allows for the creation of custom components – React comes with JSX, an optional syntax extension, which enable you to write your own components. These components accept HTML quoting, which really helps to make subcomponent rendering a more pleasant experience for developers.
- It elevates productivity for your developers – Frequent updates can turn into headaches when using a complex developing app. A single modification in one component can dramatically affect all the other components. Thankfully, Facebook has addressed this issue with React’s component reusability feature. Component reusability allows developers to essentially redeploy the same digital objects, thus making the developer’s time more productive.
- It offers fast rendering – When you’re building a complex, high-load app, it becomes important to define the structure of the app in a way that it won’t negatively impact app performance. To solve this, Facebook has introduced a virtual DOM feature. Virtual DOM, as the name suggests, is the virtual representation of DOM that allows virtual testing of any modification to first calculate any risks than may accompany each modification. As a result, this approach helps to maintain high app performance and guarantees a better overall user experience.
- It’s SEO-friendly – For any online business, search engine optimization is a crucial gateway to success. According to Moz, the shorter the page load time and the faster the rendering speed, the higher an app will rank on Google. Thanks to its fast rendering, React significantly reduces page load time when compared with other frameworks. This is a key point for helping businesses to land at the top of the page in Google search engine results!
- It comes with useful developer tools – Learning emerging technologies and using them in real-life projects can be both fun and helpful, but only if they’re used correctly. Facebook understands this, so they’ve added both React dev tools and Chrome dev tools in their React framework. These tools help developers to discover parent and child components, observe component hierarchies, and inspect components’ present state and props, among other things.
- It offers better code stability – React follows a downward data flow to ensure that the parent structure won’t be affected by modifications to the child structure. In this way, a developer can safely make specific changes to individual components as needed. This data flow and structure provides better code stability, and smoother performance of the application itself.
- React is the framework of choice for many Fortune 500 companies – Thousands of companies, including those ranking among the Fortune 500, have chosen to adopt React. Some of the top brands that have built their mobile apps with React include Airbnb, Tesla, Tencent QQ, and Walmart. And React’s web framework is currently being utilized by Netflix, Paypal, NASA, BBC, Lyft, and New York Times, among others. If these Fortune 500 companies have chosen to trust React & React Native, then it could really be a good solution for your business, too!
In Conclusion
In many ways, React is a revolutionary approach to building both front-end and mobile apps. It’s quickly grown to be a favorite tool among JavaScript developers, and React certainly appears to be here to stay. The website development team at Cibirix absolutely loves using React for our clients, and with all the benefits that React offers, we plan to continue using it! Still not sure which framework or library is the right for you? Just give us a shout, and we’ll be happy to help you find the best approach for your business!
Ready to Move Forward? Cibirix Can Help!
Cibirix is a digital agency that exists to help businesses like yours to attract, engage, and retain customers through the creative use of technology. Whether you need web design, app development, or digital marketing & branding services, we’ve got you covered! Plus, we deliver on our promises to provide your business with real, measurable results!
Ready to help your business get seen, get heard, and really start GROWING? Reach out to us at Cibirix today!
