Front-end libraries and frameworks are becoming a necessary component of today’s online development stack. Within the JavaScript community, React.js is a front-end library that has steadily taken the lead as the preferred framework for contemporary web development.
React is capable of making API calls (sending the request to the backend), which deal with the data. It is a framework that employs Webpack to automatically compile React, JSX, and ES6 code while handling CSS file prefixes. React is a JavaScript-based UI development library. Although React is a library rather than a language, it is widely used in web development. The library first appeared in May 2013 and is now one of the most commonly used frontend libraries for web development.
Here are some key features and functionalities of React.js:
- Component-based: React.js is built around the concept of reusable components. Components are small, self-contained units that can be composed together to build complex UIs. This promotes modularity and reusability in code.
- Virtual DOM: React.js uses a virtual DOM (Document Object Model) to optimize the performance of UI updates. Instead of directly manipulating the browser’s DOM, React creates a lightweight representation of the DOM in memory and updates it efficiently. This minimizes the number of DOM manipulations, resulting in faster rendering.
- Declarative syntax: React uses a declarative syntax to define UI components. Developers describe what the UI should look like at any given point in time, and React takes care of updating the DOM to match this desired state. This makes code more predictable and easier to understand.
- JSX: React introduces JSX (JavaScript XML), which allows developers to write HTML-like code within JavaScript. JSX makes it easier to define UI components and helps to maintain the component structure alongside the logic.
- One-way data flow: React enforces a unidirectional data flow, where data flows downward from parent components to child components. This helps to maintain data consistency and makes it easier to debug and reason about the application’s state.
Overall, React.js simplifies the process of building interactive and responsive user interfaces by providing a component-based architecture, efficient rendering through virtual DOM, and a declarative programming model.