Information You Need to Know About ReactJS Before Using It in Your Project

ReactJS is certainly a good tool for UI development. From this article, you will learn about its key features, as well as about the advantages and disadvantages of this framework.

Key Features

1. Universality. Developers use ReactJS on servers and mobile platforms with the help of React Native.
2. Declarativity. Using this library, a developer can describe how a component of the interface looks in different states, which reduces code and makes it clearer.
3. Components based. Each of the components returns a part of the user interface with its state. A completed web page interface can be created by joining the components.
4. JSX usage. Its syntax extension is used for interface description. JSX enables it to describe JavaScript code by using ready components that nearly repeat HTML.
5. Virtual DOM usage. This tool helps update the actual DOM efficiently.

Advantages of Using ReactJS

• Community, which has contributed a lot in making this tool great for developing and improving UIs for web applications. Today’s appearance of ReactJS is surely the result of the united effort.
• Virtual DOM. Document Object Model (DOM) determines the structure of an HTML document, and it can be interacted with by applying various programming languages. The virtual DOM includes certain benefits:
  1. Increased performance. This model makes an application responsive, fast, and convenient.
  2. Effectiveness. Virtual DOM is updated each time when a certain change is executed.
• Reusable Parts. ReactJS is focused on making components reusable. Having half-ready open-source components from its libraries available, ReactJS allows its users to save plenty of time.
• Information Downward Flow. Data in ReactJS goes in one direction only, which is considered to be a very beneficial feature, as it prevents the debugging of facilities and possible errors.
• React Tools. The tools are extensions for Firefox and Chrome that provide a complex of inspection widgets to make the development simpler. The provided extensions ease debugging and help developers find the required components amongst others.

Disadvantages of Using ReactJS

1. Troublesome JSX

Since JSX applies its syntax extension to create JavaScript objects with HTML, this feature takes some time to become used to it. That’s why newbies may consider JSX as a disadvantage of ReactJS.

2. SEO Difficulties 

Pages indexing procedure is complicated, which usually takes too much time for Google bots to work properly. Besides, server-side rendering and pre-rendering may help make a website search engine optimized.

3. Poor documentation

ReactJS libraries lack comprehensive information. Thus, developers update libraries with no documentation amending, which makes it difficult for those who have familiarity with new features.

4. Narrow UI Focus

Compared with frameworks, ReactJS is not an all-in-one tool that allows the development of an entire application. If one uses ReactJS, they certainly have to integrate additional tools for routing, APIs, and other applications’ segments. Considering the fact that some other JavaScript frameworks provide complex solutions and make the creation of all components of the MVC pattern possible, some developers claim this aspect to be a disadvantage of ReactJS.

Summary

ReactJS is considered to be an effective library for working with UIs.

Despite being trouble for beginners, difficult search engine optimization process, and the library’s poor documentation, ReactJS is certainly worth using for several reasons:

• its UI code is easy to maintain;
• its separate components approach claims to be a very perspective one for web development;
• it suits best for teamwork.