What is React and what is it used for?

Where does React come from?

The web has traditionally been built in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, separated into different folders. This makes it complicated to scale and extract certain parts of the code (especially JS and CSS) to migrate or reuse functionalities due to the dependencies between these languages.

But what would happen if we put all this into a single package? This is what the engineers at Facebook must have asked themselves, leading to the release of the first version of the now-famous library in mid-2013.

React is based on a paradigm called component-oriented programming in which each component is a piece with which the user can interact. These pieces are created using a syntax called JSX, allowing you to write HTML (and optionally CSS) within JavaScript objects.
These componentes are reusable and combine to create larger componentes until a complete web is configured.
This is the way to have HTML with all the functionality of JavaScript and the graphical style of CSS centralized and ready to be abstracted and used in any other project.

Why React?

React brings a series of clear advantages over the classic way of making a web, its ease of development combined with performance, flexibility, and code organization make it one of the best options.

One of the main reasons for this to be possible is the use of the virtual DOM. React is capable of generating the DOM dynamically, making changes in a memory copy and then comparing it with the current version of the DOM. This way, it avoids rendering the entire page every time there are changes; it simply applies the change to the component that has been updated, simple and fast. This promotes a better user experience, as well as impressive performance and fluidity.

In every web project, it is important to consider positioning, and precisely this is one of the main problems of this type of frameworks. This is due to the decoupling between the client and server parts; the HTML content is obtained through API requests and subsequently generated. This causes the content to not exist yet when the Google bot crawls the web. With React, we will not have this problem as it allows for isomorphism, meaning it can render this HTML both on the client and the server. This way, when the Google bot arrives, we can deliver the already rendered content, allowing us to position just as well as the typical WordPress of all time.

React Native deserves another post on its own, but for now, it is worth mentioning that it is another tool that, by compiling the same Javascript code, facilitates the generation of native applications for Android, iOS, etc.

What acceptance does it have in the market?

The última encuesta de StackOverflow reveals that React es el framework más querido y más deseado en este ultimo año, in addition to being the second most used, only behind jQuery. This is strongly linked to the fact that Javascript is once again the most popular language for the seventh consecutive year, which marks a clearly upward trend.

It is no coincidence that companies like Netflix, Airbnb, Dropbox, Paypal, Tesla, Whatsapp, Uber, etc. have bet on this technology. The investment that Facebook has made along with the large number of developers who have contributed to this open-source library makes it a safe bet for the future.

React y Drupal

Drupal 8 is a powerful CMS that offers great backend customization and provides a lot of flexibility in content management. At Drauta, we are specialists in web design and use React in the development of applications to improve page load speed and the frontend.