Why should my company choose ReactJS for my next project?

In this article we will learn a few things about ReactJS that will help you make the decision to go for it and use this technology.

But first of all, what is ReactJS?

Plain and simple, ReactJS is a JavaScript Library used to build Single Page Application (SPA) created by Jordan Walke, a software engineer from Facebook.

This library is currently used by Microsoft, Instagram, Skype, Uber, Tesla, Facebook and more.

But wait… What does it mean that ReactJS is a library? While other similar technologies like Angular are Frameworks which gives you a standardized skeleton where you have almost everything needed to start, without having to choose between different Libraries.??

By choosing and using ReactJS, you start from scratch, and also, you are able to choose which other libraries you want to include in your project, to get the most of it.?

This may be seen as an advantage or disadvantage, depending on how you wanna develop. By having to manually include other libraries, it gives you more independence to pick what can suit better in your project, instead of being restricted to go for default options.

Anyway, there are Frameworks based on ReactJS in which you can rely on to take care of the basics, like NextJS.

Now that we know what ReactJS is, let's dig a little bit deeper on its unique characteristics.

Reusable Components:

You have the possibility to create reusable components which can speed up your development process in a way you never imagined. How? It allows the principle of writing once, use it everywhere. Allowing your team to work on a specific component or 'piece of code' and then implement it in different pages or sections without any extra cost. Fact! ReactJS was one of the firsts JavaScript, both libraries and framework which allowed? you to do that.

Virtual DOM:

As you may imagine, during WWW (World Wide Web) beginnings, it was such a headache to update pages dynamically without the need for the entire page to be reloaded. We could only use plain javascript functions to get the DOM elements and update them.

ReactJS revolutionized this by creating the Virtual DOM. Virtual DOM has the ability to improve the performance of webapps when making updates.?

JSX:

JSX means JavaScript extension. This is a new way to define the User Interface combining HTML and JavaScript in the same file. JSX is a way to try to make our code cleaner and consequently, readable.

SEO:

With the first JavaScript frameworks we used to get into an issue when willing to share websites, for example in social networks. You realized that the app was not SEO friendly when you just saw links and code pieces, unreadable for the rest of human beings.

Fortunately for us, frameworks like NextJS came to fix those issues while still using ReactJS as our main library.

What about Mobile?

Here, ReactJS brings another advantage… There is a library called React Native which, as you may assume, shares a lot of similarities with ReactJS. It allows a smooth transition from being a Web Developer to a Mobile Developer, and starts working in the mobile version of our project without the need of having a specific team focusing ONLY on Mobile.

So.. in conclusion;

ReactJS is a great option when it comes to choose between the different technologies available in the market due to its great versatility, development agility and the ecosystem that surrounds it.