Useful Resources & Links
React is an amazing library for creating highly reactive and super fast javascript driven Web applications. We'll learn it through a real application, we're going to build.
What is React?
A JavaScript Library for building User Interfaces
JS library – React Apps run in the user's browser. It means we don't have to wait for a server response to get a new page or to render something new.
User Interfaces are basically what the user sees, and React is all about using components for building UIs.
Building an UI with components allow us to build tiny things on their own (and not the entire web page). It makes working in teams easier. And it makes it easy for us to keep our code manageable.
React is solving the problem of having to build complex UIs with what HTML and JavaScript gives you; by writing maintainable, manageable and reusable pieces of that code which you can throw into your web app wherever you need to use it. Maximilian Schwarzmüller's
Let's go to codepen.io and click on create. (Check Max's code).
- UI State becomes difficult to handle with Vanilla JavaScript – React helps us by making the whole UI state management a non-issue.
- Focus on business logic, not on preventing your App from exploding (+ React is maintained by a big community => framework creators probably write better code).
- Huge ecosystem, active community, high performance.
Angular and Vuejs are a real alternatives. Not so much jQuery.
| Single Page Applications | Multi Page Applications |
|---|---|
| Only ONE HTML page, content is (re)rendered on client | Multiple HTML pages, content is rendered on server |
| Every component is controlled by React | Static HTML&CSS and a few React components ("widgets") added on some pages |
Typically only ONE ReactDOM.render() call |
One ReactDOM.render() call per "widget" |