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Arnab Saha
Arnab Saha

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Why Should We Use React For the Front-End?

React JS is a JavaScript library built and maintained by Facebook. React is an efficient, declarative, and flexible open-source JavaScript library for creating simple, fast, and scalable frontends of web applications.

The language used to build React applications is JSX. JSX is basic JavaScript that facilitates HTML quoting and uses the syntax of this HTML tag to make subcomponents.

ReactJS is a stronger framework because of its ability to break down the complex interface and allow users to work on individual components.

ReactJS's core objective is to deliver the best rendering performance possible. Its strength stems from the emphasis on individual parts. ReactJS helps developers break down the complicated UI into smaller components, rather than operating on the entire web framework.

Key Benefits of React JS for Front-End Development

React JS offers tons of benefits. Let’s see the key benefits of React JS to understand why it stands out from other front-end JavaScript development frameworks.

Speed

React allows developers to utilize individual parts of their application on both the client-side and the server-side, which ultimately boosts the speed of the development process.

In simple terms, different developers can write individual parts and all changes made won’t affect the logic of the application.

Flexibility

Compared to other front-end frameworks, the React code is easier to maintain and is flexible due to its modular structure. This flexibility, in turn, saves a huge amount of time and cost for businesses.

Performance

React JS was designed to provide high performance in mind. The core of the framework offers a virtual DOM program and server-side rendering, which makes complex apps run extremely fast.

Usability

Deploying React is fairly easy to accomplish if you have some basic knowledge of JavaScript.

In fact, an expert JavaScript developer can easily learn all the ins and outs of the React framework in a matter of a day or two.

Reusable Components

One of the main benefits of using React JS is its potential to reuse components. It saves time for developers as they don’t have to write various codes for the same features. Furthermore, if any changes are made in any particular part, it will not affect other parts of the application.

So, now that you know the key benefits of the React framework, let’s move forward and also check out the top reasons to Choose React JS for your next project.

Why React JS Can Be the Best Choice for Your Project

If you are still not sure whether to choose React JS for your project or not, these reasons will help you make the decision.

Below, I mention the top reasons why React JS can be the best framework for your project.

It helps to build rich user interfaces

Today, the quality of the user interface in an application plays an important role. If the user interface is poorly designed, then it lowers the chances of an application to succeed.

But, if an application has a high-quality UI, then there are better chances that your users will love to use the app.

Therefore, building rich user interfaces is sort of necessary for an application to survive and thrive.

The good news is that React allows building such high-quality, rich user interfaces through its declarative components, which brings us to our next point.

It allows writing custom components

React comes with JSX, an optional syntax extension, which makes it possible to write your own components.

These components accept HTML quoting and also make all subcomponent rendering a delightful experience for developers.

Though there have been many debates on the matter of JSX, it has already for writing custom components, building high-volume applications, and converting HTML mockups into ReactElement trees.

Not only this but after creating components developers can reuse them in the whole app as components are highly customizable, and due to this it speeds up the development process.

It uplifts developers’ productivity

Frequent updates often turn into headaches when an app has complex logic and when a single modification in one component can dramatically affect other components.

But, to combat this problem, Facebook has amplified React with the component reusability feature.

Component reusability in React basically allows developers to redeploy the same digital objects.

The process is simple too! – developers, for example, can begin adding simple components such as buttons, text fields, and checkboxes and then move them to wrapper components, which are ultimately moved forward to the root component.

This approach provides better code maintenance and growth as each component in React has its own internal logic, which is easy to manipulate and as a result, boosts the productivity of application development.

It offers fast rendering

When you’re building a complex, high-load app, it becomes mandatory to define the structure of the app in the beginning since it can impact the performance of your app.

In simple words, the DOM model is tree-structured. So, a minor modification at a higher level layer can awfully impact the user interface of an application. To solve this, Facebook has introduced a virtual DOM feature.

Virtual DOM, as the name suggests, is the virtual representation of DOM that allows testing all changes to the virtual DOM first to calculate risks with each modification.

This approach, as a result, helps to maintain high app performance and guarantees a better user experience.

It comes with useful developer toolset

Learning emerging technologies and using them in real-life projects can be both fun and beneficial, but only if they are used correctly.

Facebook understands this, and it’s for this reason they have added much-needed React dev tools and Chrome dev tools to their React JS framework.

These React tools help developers discover child and parent components, observe component hierarchies, and inspect components’ present state and props.

Strong community support

One of the biggest reasons why you should choose React for front-end development is that it has very strong community support. A large community of React developers is making it better as it’s an open-source library and coders from around the world are helping people learn the technology in different ways.

ToolKit support

In the market there bunch of toolkits are available that can be used to start the upper level of development directly as the toolkit contains provides bundle of configuration and code of boilerplate.

Final Thoughts

Actually, one of the reasons why I believe React is better than other frameworks is that it has a larger community support and, great development tooling and it has tons of different libraries for every use case. Also, I should mention that React has maintained a much more stable API compared to Angular and Vue at this juncture.

From my perspective, these things make React the best choice for enterprise web application development.

But, React has some trade-offs too. Apart from the advantages of React that were mentioned above, React has some problems too:

  1. Too much boilerplate code to write
  2. Really complicated state management strategies
  3. Too easy to abuse its features and develop applications in a wrong way

Sometimes, it's worth to use React and sometimes it's not. I believe choosing a web app framework depends on the type of project. The framework that fits your project's needs is the perfect choice.

Top comments (13)

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jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️

React JS was designed to provide high performance in mind. The core of the framework offers a virtual DOM program and server-side rendering, which makes complex apps run extremely fast.

In benchmarks, React is consistently one of the slowest such UI libraries around

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forguz profile image
Nicolas Dellazzeri

React is fast in the sense that his code tends to be orthogonal, since it's split in components and the essence of these components came from pure functions, making it easier to give maintenance and to provide reusability of code. I find it easy to maintain react components while using the Atomic Design approach that works well alongside react.

In my experience working with React, Vue, Svelte, I've observed that React tends to be more decoupled than the other two technologies.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

There's nothing wrong with learning React, but some of your points feel a little misleading.

@jonrandy has already mentioned speed, but things like

Compared to other front-end frameworks, the React code is easier to maintain and is flexible due to its modular structure.

I don't think that's the case - or rather, it depends what you're comparing it to and how you're measuring it. Regardless, I think a lot of people would disagree with this point in 2024.

You have a whole section about how the ability to write custom components is related to having a high-quality UI, but writing "custom components" isn't unique to React. You can do it in vanilla Javascript!

If the user interface is poorly designed, then it lowers the chances of an application to succeed.

How the UI is designed is nothing to do with how it's implemented. Sure, your app could be a chore to use or a delight, but so long as the developer is competent, that's up to your UX and design teams, and involved a host of different processes from mapping out user journeys to focus groups to meta-analyses of activity information, etc. Your users aren't going to know or care whether you use React.

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ravavyr profile image
Ravavyr

The best choice for any project is the language and codebase you are most familiar with. Anything else requires a learning curve. Get good at one thing, any thing and you'll be able to build anything.

Articles like this are nonsense. Especially considering it shows zero data or code to back up any of its claims.

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sw33tblo55om profile image
Nicole • Edited

That is why I keep going in Python, also for the frontend.

Found this very interesting open source project that allows me to fully utilize my applications in pure Python:

rio.dev/
github.com/rio-labs/rio

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nigel447 profile image
nigel447

have you seen jinja ?

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miketalbot profile image
Mike Talbot ⭐

When people say React should die for the Internet to improve, it's for the reason why many companies choose it, and probably the best reason to use it: more people are experienced in React than they are in other frameworks, so it is easy to find staff to work on projects.

To some extent, React's popularity is why we use it for our core project, for us the downsides of size etc are close to irrelevant and its style of producing components fits better with my architectural choices for our micro front-end system and loosely coupled front-end. The last time I did an assessment was in 2020 though. Then it was: my first choice Svelte (but none of the rest of the team were interested in learning it back then), then React, with Angular and Vue not being well suited to the inversion of control architecture I was designing. To be clear, I'm sure they are great at other things.

Fundamentally there is no magic bullet, no perfect framework. You choose something capable of the design you want and you build with it, and live with the consequences. The wars raged over frameworks, the endless "this should die" or "this is the only way" articles are a boring waste of time.

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wearypossum4770 profile image
Stephen Smith

This is a poorly written article. It is subjective and provides no examples. Do better.

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dsaga profile image
Dusan Petkovic

I feel its just an AI article, smells like one.

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dsaga profile image
Dusan Petkovic

I feel like this statement doesn't make sense "Too much boilerplate code to write
" I don't think there's more boilerplate than any other front-end framework/library, you're basically left to architecture your own framework or follow a common pattern.

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webjose profile image
José Pablo Ramírez Vargas

The main problem here is the apparent inability of people to move on. "It is very easy to find trained people in React", or "You can find a library for anything in React". These statements are the problem and why 90% of the coders out there will be replaced by AI bots in 2 decades (yes, AI is still nowhere near producing decent code).

The fact is that React is one of the worst choices out there and people just need to snap out of its incantation. I am a Svelte supporter because I have never ever seen a framework that is so easy to understand, yet so powerful. I have said it before: People say devs won't move on because of the learning curve. Then let's get it done with. Svelte's learning curve is particularly flat and easy if you know at least one other framework.

Whatever framework you choose, as long as it is not React or Angular, you'll probably be in a better position.

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miketalbot profile image
Mike Talbot ⭐

This is impractical as a choice for me. I've got projects to complete and React as a tool is just fine. I don't have the budget to train a team of 30 in a new platform and then discover all of the new ways we can make bugs, find the challenges in all of the libraries that mimic what I already have. That would deliver me 0 value. React causes me very few issues. I'm not sure why this should bother anyone else.

My investors would think I was mad to throw away money on replatforming without demonstrable value.

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webjose profile image
José Pablo Ramírez Vargas

React is an efficient library

Such a lie. Interactive Results

The truth is that React is one of the worst performers ever.