5 reasons to choose React

React is one of our favourite technologies for developing applications - and we’re not alone. It’s estimated that there’s over five-million React developers worldwide! Those who don’t yet understand what it is, may struggle to work out “why to choose React”?

React is a Javascript library used for building user interfaces. It’s designed to help developers create more dynamic, interactive and performant applications for the web - and beyond.

Here are 5 reasons why we love it!

1) It's used by some amazing companies

One way to display proof and confidence in React’s ability to deliver, is to look at companies who are currently using React. These include Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, Pinterest, Paypal, IMDB and Dropbox. All of them use React to create high quality applications that are used by millions. There's got to be a reason why all of the biggest websites in the world use it, right?

2) Performance

React uses a concept called the “Virtual DOM”, which is basically a virtual representation of your app's UI kept in memory. When a change occurs in your app, the Virtual DOM is able to run a quick comparison to see what has changed, and then can swiftly apply those specific changes to the real application. This means developers are able to write in a declarative way, allowing them to just change the “state” of the app - and React works out what should actually update. There’s no manual DOM manipulation required!

3) Great community support

React was originally created by Facebook to solve issues around performance when working with a great number of personalised data-heavy components. Since React was released to the world, it has grown rapidly in popularity. In May 2013, it was made fully open source, meaning that the entire developer community can now help improve the experience and performance of React, helping it to really lead the charge in improving the speed and capabilities of the web. There are countless articles and tutorials about React, and being so popular means that questions are answered quickly.

4) Developer experience

Developers aren't just using React because they have to. Opinion polls show that developers LOVE to use it. In the 2019 Enterprise JavaScript survey, 63% of the 33,000 respondents said that they prefer to write code in React. It’s easy to write clean, reusable code and there’s not a huge amount of boiler plate to learn, as most of React just uses plain Javascript. There are plenty of third-party libraries to enhance React and developer tools to make it easy to debug.

5) React Native

React was designed for the web, but thanks to its slight separation from using HTML directly, it can be applied to many other platforms. Normal native app development can be extremely expensive, mainly because if you want your app to run on iPhone and Android then you have to write two apps in two completely different languages. React allows you to maintain a single codebase, write your code in Javascript, and compile your code to work on both IOS and Android. The end result is native code, so the performance and experience is still great, but the code can be maintained by a single set of developers. This can be very powerful, especially as these same developers could also develop the web version of your app.