If you’re not familiar with React, React is a JavaScript library, and a web application can be written using React. With React building single page applications (SPA) becomes easy. In this article you will discover, is React still on demand in 2022?
What is React?
React is a JavaScript library, which allows to separate the UI and the logic of the application. This is particularly useful when building multi-tenant applications, where the UI is shared across different applications with different data.
But even though React is very commonly used as a view library, it is not the only technology you can use to build a UI. There are plenty of other web UI frameworks, such as React-Native, which allows you to build applications for mobile devices. We’re going to be focusing on using React on the web.
Is React still used?
Even though it has been around for a while, React is still very popular. There are a lot of jobs advertised with the term React, and it’s become quite trendy to use React on the frontend of a web application.
One reason for this is React is a great way to make the frontend code more maintainable. The logic and the frontend code for the UI can be made into the different components. Using such approach enables you to abstract the logic, which makes swapping out the UI for a different version easy.
Advantages of learning React JS in 2022
React is a little bit different to how things were done in the past, because in the past you’d put everything on one page. There would be one HTML page with lots of JavaScript to handle the interactions, and that would cause a lot of complexity. With React, the HTML page still gets updated, and everything is in the page.
But instead of having lots of JavaScript, it is moved into a library. React itself is actually quite small, and so in order to use React, you can just include it, create your components, and then the app works out how to update itself. So even though there is a page with lots of JavaScript, there’s just one HTML page. Here is a quick recap:
- React is a JavaScript framework.
- React helps to clear the clutter on page.
- It is good for creating single-page web applications.
Does React replace vanilla JavaScript?
React is really just a different way of doing things, rather than replacing JavaScript itself. But of course, if you use React, you do end up with a whole bunch of JavaScript. So it’s not really one or the other. I’d say React itself is just a library, and when you use React, you can use all the libraries that React has.
Summary — should you learn React?
As you already know, React JS is still used a lot in 2022. So if you’re building a website in 2022, it’s not a bad idea to learn it. You can use React to make your UI easier to update, or you can use React because you want to build something that looks different to the previous applications. React is very popular, and it’s easy to learn.