As beginners journeying into the world of Front-End Development, we are often confronted with a plethora of frontend UI development frameworks that are widely used across the arena. And thus, we are confronted with the very difficult task of choosing the right framework for ourselves – more so, since often beginners find themselves not knowing how to choose the right framework to learn given their background and understanding level. In this article, I shall be looking into the React framework and why it is a good option to pursue for beginners for frontend development.

React is a UI development library in JavaScript that was developed by Facebook in May 2013. It is an open source library and is widely used in the web development community. Other than UI and frontend development, React also provides us with various extensions like Flux and React Native for entire application architectural support and cross-platform mobile application development. 

  • React is widely used for the purpose of creating dynamic web applications because it requires minimal coding and provides more functionalities for the less code.  
  • React provides us with much faster web application performance through the usage of Virtual DOM. Virtual DOM compares the components’ previous states and updates only the items in the Real DOM that were changed, instead of updating all of the components again, as conventional web applications do.
  • The building blocks of a React application are called components. These components have their logic and controls, and they can be reused throughout the application, which in turn dramatically reduces the application’s development time.
  • When we design a React application, we can nest child components within parent components to ensure unidirectional data flow which is crucial as it would become easier to debug errors and know where a problem occurs in an application at the moment in question.
  • React is easy to learn, as it mostly combines basic HTML and JavaScript concepts with some beneficial additions.
  • There are dedicated tools for easy debugging that are provided to us, such as a Chrome Extension developed by Facebook that can be used for debugging React applications. 

Thus, React JS is a very useful and widely used framework that should be explored by all beginners exploring the domain of frontend UI development. In the upcoming posts, we shall explore some other UI frameworks and libraries that can be of great use to all newcomers and established developers in the field of frontend development.

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