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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

Posted on • Edited on

Explain React to Me

React first came on the scene and introduced some new concepts, like State and Props. But mostly it introduced idea of declarative rendering based on the state of the program.

Since then React has evolved and expanded. Lots of new terms, and new concepts.

Can you explain React in 2019 to me, from a conceptual point of view?

Latest comments (24)

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roggc profile image
roggc

From my point of view, react is awesome. As they have said it's all about functions which at the end returns markup to render or update, based on props and state. State is like data kept in memory which you can use to determine function behaviour. You can lift up state and pass it down through props in order one component interacts or affect another. Flow is always downwards. If you define state locally there is no way this information goes up in the tree hierarchy. It is for this reason lifting state up. You can do test driven development with react. React is simple but powerfull.

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jeromedeleon profile image
Jerome De Leon

React is like a LEGO where you can build amazing things like airplane, cars or your own house together with your friends and what's more? it's free.

Hope I explain it to you like your five. 😁😁

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Probably come late here but I have a question too:

is React becoming simpler or more complicated?

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varjmes profile image
james • Edited

Building small composable parts of your user interface, where each can manage their own existence in the world.

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sag1v profile image
Sagiv ben giat

(state) => UI

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codercatdev profile image
Alex Patterson

I can't but Tyler can!
link.ajonp.com/tylermcginnis-react

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taimoorsattar7 profile image
Taimoor Sattar

You can write an application without React. You can use React to dynamically load components [which are simply HTML elements] which you can achieve the same by writing (a lot of) javascript. React makes it easier to load dynamic components. With the huge React developer on the scene, Google started supporting crawling Javascript-based content.

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Rémy 🤖

Easy: if you got frustrated that PHP best practices moved to some form of architecture which separates the presentation from the data then you are not alone and Facebook got you covered. Enter the wonderful world of writing HTML in the middle of your JS again!

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antonmelnyk profile image
Anton Melnyk • Edited

Conceptually, React is actually an UI runtime. The real truth behind React is greatly described by the creator of Redux and one of the Facebook's engineers, Dan Abramov:
Link to the article

Very abstractly, React helps you write a program that predictably manipulates a complex host tree in response to external events like interactions, network responses, timers, and so on.

Where host tree is basically DOM.

Strongly recommend to read that article for every React developer.

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Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦

React is a non-standard, userland rewriting of a subset of the web-components specifications.