We know that 2018 is already in its second half and moving towards a great end. Technologies have evolved in a huge number and this year became famous for introducing many user-friendly features in various frameworks. ReactJS already had a nice year in 2017 and in 2018 it has almost surpassed its competitors and has shown really nice growth in terms of its popularity. Considering ReactJS for developing projects will give a great foundation to the success of the project.

ReactJS is a very splendid tool to make a high-performance web application. It is an open-sourced library developed by the JavaScript developers and is available to everyone. It is maintained by one of the giant IT company Facebook.

Facts why to use ReactJS for your next project:

Before knowing the real reasons to use ReactJS for the next project, here are some of the facts that will make you consider it as your next choice.

1. It was created by the cooperation of Instagram, Facebook and a large community of the users.

2. In a survey conducted by Stack Overflow, it stands amongst the most loved, dreaded and wanted framework in 2018.

Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/

3. It is amongst one of the most famous frameworks, libraries, and the tools in 2018. It is also the third most commonly used technology of 2018.

Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/

4. According to a report on w3Techs, ReactJS is used by 0.1% of all the websites, that is a JavaScript library market share of 0.2% and in the similar report it is observed that on the basis of the ranking of the websites using JavaScript libraries, ReactJS stands a great percentage of the total market share that is based on this criterion.

Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/js-angularjs,js-react

5. ReactJS is very popular amongst the developers and in 2018 it covers a large market position in terms of traffic and the technology used. The graph below depicts the exact scenario.

Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/js-angularjs,js-react

Now that enough of facts have been collected to make your mind to switch to this emerging and promising technology, let us look over some points that are the actual features of this beautiful frontend technology. I am going to explore the top points that can make you switch to ReactJS.

Top 9 reasons to use ReactJS why companies should switch to ReactJS:

1. It has JSX – an HTML like syntax:

React uses JSX which is a syntax extension to JavaScript. JSX looks like the template language but it has all the powers of JavaScript. An example describing the syntax of a JSX file looks like the below line of code.

const element = <h1>Hello World! This is a demo JSX code </h1>; 1 const element = < h1 > Hello World ! This is a demo JSX code < / h1 > ;

The code above is neither a complete HTML nor a complete string. That may be funny to many developers but yes that finds a place in trends these days. This is the very unique way that produces the React “elements”. React was developed, embracing the fact that rendering page logic is inherently coupled with another UI logic. JSX helps in achieving the results by handling the separate concerns with loosely coupled units called components.

This makes it unique in the web and mobile development technologies, which is why it attracting more of the projects these days.

2. It has a Virtual DOM:

Now, what does this mean to any developer that React has a virtual DOM? According to the official website definition –

“The virtual DOM (VDOM) is a programming concept where an ideal, or “virtual”, representation of a UI is kept in memory and synced with the “real” DOM by a library such as ReactDOM”.

I know, that was a little bit tricky to understand…, no problem, let us understand it in a simple sentence – Virtual DOM or the VDOM is the representation of the DOM objects which is like a sample copy of it and it is much lighter in terms of representation.



Source:https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/engineering/the-good-and-the-bad-of-reactjs-and-react-native/

Now here comes the question that how is it beneficial then? Indeed, in the much broader way. Yes, you won’t believe it but ReactJS’s virtual DOM renders the JSX and compares the Virtual DOM snapshot that was taken just before the update. By doing so, ReactJS figures out that which exact VDOM object has been changed. Once this is known, then only those objects are updated in the real DOM. This whole process is known as Diffing.

So, this is very much essential that React knows as to update which necessary part of the DOM, and hence it guarantees a better user experience and a higher app performance.

Source: https://reactjs.org/docs/rendering-elements.html

3. It is free of architecture – Clean Abstraction

One of the most positive and strongest point about React is that it does not impose its users to learn the internal processes. There is only the need to learn the component’s life cycle, props, and the states to have a good hand on ReactJS. It is not necessary to know the internal processes unlike any other languages such as digest cycle of AngularJS. React also do not impose any strict rules to follow any pattern or architecture like MVC or MVVM. The developer or the user is free to make and design the app’s architecture in the way which suits it best.

4. It has a One-Way data flow:

React is said to have one-way data binding. It allows downward data binding which ensures that changes in the child structures do not affect their parent. This mechanism which makes it implement the one-way data binding is expressed as “Properties flow down, actions flow up” which in turn makes a component to restrict the modification of the properties passed to it. The developer is needed to modify the state and apply the updates in order to change an object.

Many of the readers here might be in a confusion that how one-way data flow can help any language to survive? To answer this query, it is simply because clean data flow architecture can be followed and a better control of the app can be accessed, that is why this architecture is followed. This approach also makes the code more predictable and debugging also becomes easy in case anything goes wrong inside the application.

5. It is compatible with code reusability – Composable Components:

Component logic in the React application is written in JavaScript and not in the templates, that makes it rich in the sense that you can pass the data through your app. This approach makes the application to keep the state out of the DOM.

React is used to develop the application using the components and these components form a big part of the application, hence, they are made with reusable code. React is thus said to be a language of reusable components that can be used to increase the productivity. Using these reusable components make testing also very easy.

When compared to other frameworks and languages React stands unique with providing the best standards to be less complex as it is based on the phenomenon of code reusability. Encapsulated components are used in React that use their own states which are composed to make different user interfaces.

6. It is SEO Friendly:

In this competitive IT world, each day there are many developments and innovations going on. Many of the JavaScript frameworks have been built to date but all have found their path difficult when it comes to SEO. Usually, the JavaScript frameworks do not fit well with the search engines. This makes a negative impact on the ranking of the web pages. React is free from all these negative impacts and it handles the problem of SEO rankings very smoothly. It has the features that can be used to run your application on the server and the Virtual DOM can easily represent the web page on the browser efficiently.

This makes React an SEO friendly language which is easily read by the web crawlers of different search engines.

7. It has helpful Developer Toolset:



It becomes a necessary requirement for a developer to know each and every feature of a new technology so that the project development process becomes very comfortable. For fulfilling this purpose a framework or the library must be features and tools ready so that it becomes effective for a developer to use them.

React comes with many such features along with the debugging and design tools. These tools include the starter kit, UI components, ready-made Login modules for Facebook and Google, UI Widgets such as Infinite Scroll and Color Picker.

There are some Routing tools such as React Router, Aviator and Component Router also available in the React.

React also offers some build tools such as Create React App, Webpack and Babel. Adding to these tools there are some very essential debugging tools such as React Developer Tools and React Inspector which help in making debugging tasks easy.



React also has some Testing tools as well – Jest, Enzyme and React Unit are among some of those major testing tools that are available.

8. It uses REDUX – a very convenient state management tool



Source: https://medium.com/modus-create-front-end-development/using-react-navigation-and-redux-in-your-react-native-application-efac33265138

Redux is a state management tool that is used for JavaScript application. It is frequently used with the React applications. Although it can be used with other frameworks as well It provides a functionality to describe the UI as a function of the state. It helps in emitting the state updates in response to the actions that are taken.

Redux helps in simplifying the storing and managing component states. This is really helpful especially in the large applications that have many dynamic elements.

There are some Redux tools also available which will help in making the tasks easy. Along with that many React tools are also available that are described in the previous point that helps in making an integrated application between the React and the Redux.

9. It supports Server Side Rendering (SSR):

This is a very important feature of the React that allows pre-rendering of the initial state of the React Components on the server side. This feature helps in loading the pages fast as there is no requirement of waiting for all the JavaScript to load before actually seeing the web page.

This is a great technique to render a normal client-side single page application(SPA) on the server and then sending the fully rendered page to the client. This helps in making a place in the SEO rankings as well and makes easy for crawlers to easily identify the content.

These are some of the major points that you can consider for building an interactive user interface application. As a bonus point to these essential considerations, there is one point that will make you build your gut feels to try the React framework.

10. It has React Native – a framework to build interactive mobile applications:



After coming into the web market with the introduction of ReactJS release in 2013, the team from Facebook created React Native for the hybrid app-development for iOS and Android. It is a framework which works on the same logic of React that makes a great advantage of reusing almost 95% of the React code to build awesome mobile applications.

The Bottom Line:

ReactJS which is also said as React is now quite a famous framework and giving competition to other JavaScript frameworks such as Angular. It will be an intelligent decision to switch to React for your next project.

Habilelabs worked on many ReactJS projects successfully and providing value-added ReactJS services from a long time. Give us a call to find out more about our awesome services!

I hope these reasons to use ReactJS will make you stand unique amongst the crowd. For any queries feel free to ask in the comments section and do share your thoughts about the blog.