React Programming

React.js was designed by Jordan Walke, a Facebook programmer, who tried to solve the problems that this social network encountered when incorporating the ads. Although Walke's work began in 2010, it was not until May 2013 that Mark Zuckerberg's company launched React as an open-source solution. Since then, there have been many enthusiasts of this library that continue to contribute to its improvement.

Thanks to the work of Walke, Facebook, and all the programmers who have contributed to its optimization, we now have a tool that allows us to develop web applications in which the front-end views are directly associated with the back-end data they receive. Other alternatives to manipulate the elements of the DOM such as JQuery or even pure Javascript result in confusing and difficult to maintain code. React avoids these issues by proposing an architecture based on components, which are pieces of code that use HTML, CSS, and Javascript so that they contain both logic and presentation.

In this way, these components can be replicated and used in different parts of the application and in various interfaces, creating a more orderly, understandable, and well-orchestrated flow control. That is why React is one of the best alternatives when it comes to building ‘Single Page Applications” or SPAs which, as with the Facebook interface, load different visualizations in a single interface, without the need to reload the page.

Why use React?

As you can see, the gains you get from React are really amazing. There are many possibilities offered by this library, regardless of the size of the project and the application you want to develop. In addition, as you can see from the comparison with Angular and Vue, React was conceived with the idea that it would be a simple tool to use thus allowing the learning curve to be very steep. Contrary to a framework like Angular, we can master React Programming quickly allowing us to get the most out of it and become real experts in a short time.

What's more, there are many other advantages we have not yet mentioned. For example, the fact that it is a declarative language makes it extremely easy to create interactive interfaces, since it is React that is responsible for updating and rendering the components when the data on the server-side undergoes any modification. Added to this is the ability to use JSX, which is used as a preprocessor that saves us a lot of code, facilitates syntax, and is similar to writing HTML, which means we will be writing code that will be transformed into Javascript.

If you want to dive into the world of React, you can do some test-runs. The first thing you will have to do is install it on your computer. For this, you will have . The most common way is to install the npm packages and run them using the terminal, then install React as indicated in the . Then, you will have to make sure to request it in your app.js file, so that you can use it. The second way is the most sophisticated and yields the best results. For this option, you would use the npx package designed by Facebook, which allows you to directly run the application in a much simpler way. In addition, you can resort to running the npx package create-react-app app-name and thus you will see how the entire architecture is generated so that executing it will be as simple as typing npm start on your console.