Why React is popular ?

This article is written by cellphone4ET

Why is React so Popular?

React has emerged in recent years as one of the most popular front-end libraries for web developers tasked with creating scalable and interactive UIs for web applications. What exactly has propelled React to the forefront amongst the multitude of other competing frameworks that purport to achieve similar results? What problems does React solve that many other frameworks still struggle with? In essence, what about React has made it so popular?

Ease of Learning

React is a relatively fast library to learn when compared to other front-end solutions such as Angular 2. The official React documentation is user-friendly and makes it easy for anyone with some prior JavaScript experience to start building an app within a few hours. The learning curve can go up from there depending on the complexity of the project specifications, but the inital ease of understanding helps attract those developers to React who otherwise may have avoided it.

Components and Declarative Views

Although there are many benefits to React over its competitors, it could be argued that one of the main things driving its popularity is the modularity of its components. Write a component once in React and it can then be rendered whenever and wherever the developer pleases. In this way, React can be described as a component-based front-end library that employs declarative views. The developer has the ability to control flow and state in a React application in a simpler way while simultaneously writing less code. React components also manage their own state, which aids in the creation of increasingly complex UIs. Because all component logic is done in JavaScript, data can pass quickly through React apps while simultaneously keeping the app’s state separate from the DOM. This means that React is faster and more reliable than other front-end frameworks or libraries, especially when dealing with large quantities of data and numerous changes to the state.

The Virtual DOM

React uses something called the virtual DOM, which solves an all-too-common problem many other frameworks and front-end libraries have of updating the DOM more than necessary. Manipulating the DOM is a slow process, and the ability to avoid unnecessary updates means your application can run faster and more responsively.

The virtual DOM is essentially a representation of the current DOM object. Instead of updating the entire DOM when a React app’s state changes, React updates the virtual DOM. This is then compared against the current state of the actual DOM, and in doing so, the exact change can be identified. React can then update the DOM to reflect only those things that have changed as opposed to updating the entire DOM.

Native Option

React applications can easily be converted into native applications for mobile devices without the need to re-write much code. Although some extra skills are required to execute a React native app, the gap between React and React Native is very small. This ultimately allows web developers to easily venture into mobile web development with very little effort.