React has gained a lot of popularity recently and has attracted a large and active community. This results in a vast wealth of reusable components for it that will save you time when coding. The library itself encourages writing loosely coupled code that is modular and composable.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a small application and how to split it into discrete components that talk to each other. As a base, we will take the npm-driven website example from last month, but we’ll do it the React way. It is interesting to compare the results – the React version has a few more lines of code than the jQuery version, but we can both agree that it is much better organized.
What you need to know about React
- It is a popular client-side library/framework for building user interfaces, which is developed and used by Facebook.
- With it, you organize your application around discrete components, with each handling its own rendering and state. Components can be nested within each other.
- React is fast because it minimizes the number of writes to the DOM (the slowest part of any client-side application).
- The recommended way to write React code is by using JSX – an extension to JavaScript which presents components as HTML elements. JSX needs to be compiled to JS in order to work in browsers.
- It hasn’t hit version 1.0 as of this writing, so there might be changes in the future.
- We have a nice article with examples for learning react which you can check out. Also there is the official getting started guide here.