With the beginning of the new year, questions like ‘is the (insert the right technology here) still good in 2022, should I learn (said technology) in 2022’ etc. arise once again. This article will focus on React, since many people are concerned whether Angular and Vue.js are not overshadowing the Facebook framework. Here are some arguments ‘for’ using React.js in 2022.
A quick recap of React.js
React is known as a free, open-source and declarative front-end JavaScript library, providing great flexibilty and efficiency to its users. React is used for developing UI-component based user interaces. It was first created by a Facebok developer and dedicated to complex web interfaces as well as single-page applications. According to many developer surveys, React continues to be the main choice of software engineers, while being users by huge enterprises like Instagram, Netflix or Apple.
Reasons to choose React in 2022
There are plenty of resons why you should choose React in 2022, so let’s look at them together.
1. React Github contributors
The number of contributors on Github often is a good factor to consider whether the framework, library or programming language is going strong in the community. React.js still has over 1500 contributors with nearly 15 000 commits. It means that this JavaScript library is alive and well and is constantly improved giving the developers a wide variety of actions available for solving certain problems.
2. Library flexibility
Among many advantages of using React.js, flexibility is the one that is frequently mentioned. Due to its component-based architecture, the library is user-friendly and allows a high level of modularity. React’s codebase is lightweight, easy to maintain and parts of migration between versions can be done automatically, thanks to the react-codemod tool developed by people from React core team.
3. SEO integration
Search Engine Optimization is a process used by companies to increase user traffic. By using SSR (Server Side Rendering) you can achieve low TTI (Time to Interactive). After the app is loaded, React uses optimized algorithms to ensure it works as fast as it loads. This means, more users are able to browse the site, which in return, should result in bigger revenue.
4. React is easy to learn
React community is one of the biggest amongst other frontend frameworks. Because of that, there is plenty of tutorials, materials, and already answered questions on forums like StackOverflow. This, together with React’s improved documentation (much better than in 2017) gives newcomers an easy way to master the library in 2022. On top of that, knowledge of HTML and JavaScript gives the advantage to learn React even faster. Another year of React’s strong presence on the market means there are more experienced developers, best practices are continuing to crystallize and the overall quality of React apps goes up. This gives an advantage to product owners, as well as new developers, who can learn from experts.
5. Virtual DOM
React is known for its virtual DOM (Document Object Model) which allows updating only the parts of the webpage that were changed after user interaction. This has a huge impact on performance improvements, as operations on actual browser DOM are expensive. That way, by making operations first on the Virtual DOM, React is able to omit operations on the DOM elements that remained the same. This is extra important in bigger applications, where we need to squeeze all the performance so the users can have a fluid experience even when loads number of data is displayed on the screen.
6. React JSX
React introduced a syntax extension for JavaScript called JSX. It is an HTML-like syntax that is transpiled to regular JavaScript and then builds a Virtual DOM mentioned earlier. Even though the decision to keep "HTML" inside JS has met mixed opinions amongst developers, it seems to be surviving the trial of time and proves itself on many commercial applications.
7. Library maturity
Despite being 10 years old, React is still doing well in the fast-paced world of JavaScript frameworks/libraries. All this time, we have been spectating React going from “yet another JS framework” to being at the forefront of the market. As for 2022, we are still waiting for multiple new features to be incorporated into React. What is more, the past years lead to having many ready-to-use open source packages for common use cases thanks to the active community gathered around the framework.
Summary
Those are just a couple of reasons behind why you should continue or start using React in 2022, but there is obviously more of them. React JSX, virtual DOM and flexibility alone are the key features that prove that it is an amazing choice and despite the ever-present comparisons to frameworks like Angular or Vue, the React community remains intact.
If you are currently looking for help with development or searching for an experienced team of React developers, do not hesitate to contact us.
