React for Front-End Development – Features & Benefits [2024] (2024)

Introduction

There are many frameworks and libraries available for frontend development. Not all of them are good. React is one of the most popular and widely used libraries (it’s not a framework) for frontend development.

To give you a gentle introduction, React is an open-source JavaScript library used for frontend development, which was developed by Facebook. Its component-based library lets you build high-quality user-interfaces for web apps.

This library allows you to place HTML code inside JavaScript and it works with Virtual DOM.

The official site of React can be found at Reactjs.org. And you can find it on GitHub here.

If you have heard of React but are not sure why you should select it for your work, this post can help. What are the benefits of using React? This post will give you 6 reasons to choose React for frontend development.

React front-end development – why to choose it?

#1 Easy to learn

React is easy to learn and that is one of the most important reasons to choose this library. As it doesn’t take much time to learn this technology, you can quickly become a React developer.

If a technology is hard to learn, you will probably find it difficult to start. That, as it happens, it’s human nature. We avoid things that are hard to learn.

React is easy to learn not just because there are a great number of easy-to-understand tutorials available on the internet but mainly because it’s a very simple library. Unlike Angular, it’s not a complex tool. The learning process becomes easier when you have great JavaScript skills.

#2 Rich user-interfaces

React lets you build rich user-interfaces easily. Quality of user-interfaces is important because a poorly designed user-interface is generally less user-friendly and the users will not like a poorly designed UI.

If your web app has cool, high-quality UIs, your users will love to use your app. So building high-quality user-interfaces is crucial to business success.

Yes, you can build cool interfaces with other technologies too, but React lets you do it easily using the declarative components.

#3 Faster development

You can increase your productivity by using the reusable components and development tools. Developer’s productivity is important because if you can get things done quickly, you can earn more money in less time, which is a common goal of companies and startups.

If it takes a huge amount of time to build a simple thing, you’ll lose money. On the contrary, if you can deliver products quickly, you can earn cash quickly and your clients will also be happy.

There are many development tools available for React which speed up your work. For example, there’s a browser extension called React Developer Tools, which can make your coding work a lot easier.

You can add it to your browser and can use it to examine React components hierarchy. This extension can be installed on Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

#4 Trusted by great companies

React is used by great companies and startups such as Facebook, Dropbox, Khan Academy, CodeAcademy, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Walmart, Tesla Motors, IMDb, and so on. There are many, many popular apps that use React.

Why are so many great companies and startups using this technology? The answer is that it’s undoubtedly a very high-quality tool for frontend development.

Considering that super successful companies like Facebook and PayPal use React, that must mean that it’s a truly useful library.

#5 It’s hot and trending

React is hot and trending. It’s one of the most popular frontend technologies in the market.

The following chart demonstrates increasing global interest.

When a technology is adopted by more and more people every day, it’s clear that it’s for a reason – it’s good quality.

The number of React lovers is increasing day by day. Every day new people fall in love with this technology. So why not try it?

#6 Strong community support

One of the biggest reasons why you should choose React for frontend development is that it has a very strong community support. A large community of React developers is making it better as it’s an open-source library and coders from around the world are helping people learn the technology in different ways.

Some people upload free React tutorial videos on YouTube while others write useful tutorials, in-depth articles, and blog posts. As of writing this article, this library has 1,198 contributors and 106,128 stars on GitHub.

The following screenshot shows that Google gives 82,500,000 results for the search term ‘react tutorial’.

The tutorials, articles, and blog posts written about React will definitely help you and make you a better React coder. Besides, there are a huge number of people in the world that constantly help new learners learn the technology by answering their questions on QA sites like StackOverflow and Quora.

So while working with React, if you face problems, you can post them on QA sites and you will get reliable answers given by experts. There are also many Facebook groups focusing on React, where you can post your issues.

Final thoughts

We have learned from this post that React has impressive benefits. So does Angular! So why should we use React? Why not Angular or any other framework?

Not all frameworks and libraries will be the right fit for your work. They can be great tools but may not be the ideal choice for your development work.

Just like React, Angular is also a great, high-quality framework and it’s also been developed by the technology giant – Google.

But there’s a problem with Angular which makes React better in my opinion. The problem is that Angular is hard to learn as it’s not a simple framework. It’s a very complex framework for frontend development. On the other hand, React is a very simple, easy-to-use technology.

This article gave you 6 main reasons to choose React for frontend development. I hope you enjoyed this post!