React.js: Standing 10+ Years Strong

Ryan Modafe

May 3, 2024

In the world of web development before 2010, programming languages and common practices were extremely complex, repetitive, slow, and inefficient. The internet was still in its relatively low-level stages with frameworks such as Angular 1 or Vue being most common at the time. However, a cleaner and more optimal way of programming websites was needed.

It is important to note that HTML and JavaScript have always been at the core of website programming. HTML allows for text to be displayed on web pages, such as the one this text is being displayed on. On the other hand, JavaScript handles dynamic aspects of websites like clicking a button, routing to a different page, updating text, etc. However, much of the archaic way of web programming involved recreating files multiple times instead of distributing a single file to the places of its use. 

This all changed with Jordan Walke, who in 2010 began the development of React.js under Facebook. After a 3 year wait, on May 29, 2013, React.js was released and made available publicly, changing the entire web development landscape. But what is React?

React.js is a library. This means that it does not act as its own functional language, however. It integrates its tools with HTML and JavaScript in the form of JSX, a mash-up of the two languages. The developments made with React are almost endless but there are a few that are crucial to understanding why React is currently the future of web development.

Above all, React is quite easy to pick up and master. Because of the brevity inherent to React, it becomes fairly simple for both fresh programmers and developers experienced with JavaScript and HTML to pick up the features they have to offer. React uses declarative syntax rather than its alternative, imperative syntax. This means that developers can tell it what they want their result to be and the React library handles the heavy lifting of implementing how this occurs. Along with this, React is component-based. This is a fundamental concept of how React operates. Components are JSX files that only need to be written once and can be used anywhere in a project as necessary. All JSX files are components by default which makes the development process significantly swifter and less frustrating.

Finally, on the web, all sites have a DOM (Document Object Model) which acts like a tree including all visible aspects of a website from buttons to text on all pages. What React cleverly does is virtualize the DOM by making a copy of it first and then updating it as little as necessary whenever the content on a page changes. This approach to page loading allows for significantly faster connection on the web page as opposed to the traditional model which refreshes the entire DOM whenever content on the page changes. 

React has brought to the table a revolutionary way of website creation. Gone are the days of needing to slave over code that is unimportant to the idea behind a website. With React, web development is made easy and fast, making it the best way to create a website today.