Reasons Why Reactjs is Racing Up the Popularity Charts

by JS Panther Full Stack | Javascript Developer

If there is one technology that the programming world can’t do without, then it is certainly Javascript. The potential of this technology can be estimated from the fact that it is used by 94.9% of all the websites.

With such popularity and significance, a number of JavaScript libraries and frameworks have been introduced that are revolutionizing the way modern and dynamic UI for the web is developed. One such sought-after library for building web user interfaces is ReactJS.

Like Facebook, the introducer of React, defines it:

“React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.”

The framework has long been helping JS developers with robust web apps quickly and efficiently with minimal coding. The core objective of ReactJS is to provide the best possible rendering performance. Its strength comes from the focus on individual components i.e. instead of working on the entire web app, ReactJS allows the developers to break down the complex UI into simpler components. This, in turn, not only makes the development process easier but faster as well.

ReactJS Statistics: Popularity and Usage

There is an umpteen number of frameworks out there for building UI, but React has gained a lot of popularity in a lot lesser time. With 138K Stars on Github, the framework has massive usage:

In StackOverflow Survey 2018, 69.4% of developers voted React as one of the preferred JS libraries for app development.
According to Similar Tech, over 334,251 websites are built using ReactJS including tech giants like Facebook, Netflix, IMDb and Walmart.

Next comes why? Or what makes ReactJS so popular.

Well, the reasons aren’t numbered. However, we have prepared a list of top five reasons that make ReactJS a preferable choice among developers and of course the most trending framework.

Let’s explore.

Ease of Use

As software projects get bigger and more complex, simplicity becomes efficacy. While, being able to develop state-of-the-art solutions is creditable, it’s not worth it if you have to spend what seems like eternity learning a new language. ReactJS comes to the rescue here. It’s not just easy to learn but also easy to use. Also, the documentation, tutorials and training options it offers are a great source of help and knowledge.

Further, by employing downward data flow, it allows you to directly work with components while ensuring changes in child elements do not effect parent data. All this together results in a faster and effective app development process.

Faster Development with Reusable Components

ReactJS allows developers to build a Single Page Application (SPA) or a web app using independent and reusable components. Each component in React is a piece of UI, these are combined to build a complex, comprehensive user interface. Any application that is built using ReactJS, has a root component, which further contains other components, making a tree-like hierarchy.

For instance, for an application like Facebook, profile, feeds, status/picture updates etc are the components. A status/picture update can further have components, such as like, comment or share. These components, once developed can be used in other pages of an app, thereby accelerating the development cycle. Thus, the concept of reusable components differentiates ReactJS from its competitive front end development technologies.

Virtual DOM

Development usually demands a careful examination of how the app structure is going to impact the user interface. Very often, minor changes leave a major effect on the end-user experience. Well, this isn’t the case with ReactJS, thanks to virtual DOM. Any new changes are first performed on the virtual DOM and have no effect on the actual app. Once these changes are evaluated, they are implemented effectively to the real DOM. The result? Improved performance and seamless user experience.

Developer Tools

Learning new technologies is always exciting until you have a good collection of tools to design and debug. Well, React again takes the lead here. It comes with a set of developer tools for Chrome and Firefox which can be used to evaluate, examine and edit properties, and state of component hierarchies in the virtual DOM. You can also track the hierarchy of any component and discover both parent and child components.

Strong Community Support

ReactJS has a community of millions of developers. There are popular forums like Stackoverflow where developers can ask code-level questions or get specific errors resolved. Also, there are popular forums online that discuss the best practices, application architecture and future of React. Some of the communities include React Discuss, Spectrum’s React Community, DEV’s React Community etc. With such strong community support, getting started with React application development and building complex UI components is a plain sailing task for developers.

The Future of ReactJS

Well, the future looks good!!

Not just because it is maintained by the social behemoth FACEBOOK, but because the community keeps on displaying new and optimized versions for developers out in the battlefield. Further, corporations like PayPal, Uber, Instagram and Airbnb use React for its ability to deliver remarkable UX and UI.

So, if you are someone just starting in the frontend world, React might prove to be a kick-starter.

What’s your opinion?

Officially published at Reasons Why Reactjs is Racing Up the Popularity Charts