Pros and Cons of Using React in Web Development

ReactJs took over the web development community by storm, Now-a-days most web applications are built using this library. But what are the advantages and downsides of this technology?

What is ReactJs About?

So, To understand how ReactJs works, we need to know how web applications are built. Most of the sites are pages, working with a backend server. We need to remember that Reactjs is only a frontend library, There should be some other technology like ExpressJs or React Frameworks like NextJs to build a full stack web application. React Applications are built in the form of components. The main feature of React comes from this feature, where we can reuse components anywhere in our application. It was developed by Facebook, and its constantly being updated.

A single pages application or SPA can be easily made using Reactjs, If you want to build a static application with a good UI and functionality React is the best choice. It is an open source technology with huge community support, you might find solutions to any solutions over the internet. The data flow in react is in a one-way direction, which means data can be passed to components from top to bottom, we can also use different strategies using other libraries like Redux, etc. 

Why should we use Reactjs?

Today, most web applications are either made of PHP or Java but they are being shifted to ReactJs and other technologies because of the functionalities and power which they provide. All the Legacy applications are being moved to ReactJs, Even Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Dropbox are made using ReactJs.

This is all because of the revolutionary NodeJs development, which made JS be used out of the browser. ReactJS is used with NodeJS and its package manager which enhances its capabilities from which we can use other libraries of NPM. But Everything has its Advantages and Disadvantages Let's see in detail about React.

Advantages of ReactJs.

• Component-Based: ReactJs applications are made using components; these components are reusable, meaning there is no need to rewrite the code for some particular thing. Many things like Navbar, Footer, or status bars needed to be added to different pages, by using components we can simply write once and use it anywhere.

• Huge Community: ReactJs has huge community support, there are many developers trying to solve problems and there are constant updates and bug fixes in this library. the developers keep this technology updated and error-free. You can resolve any issues in our applications by looking over its solution on the internet sure you will find some solution to it.

• Easy To Learn: ReactJS sure seems kinda complicated at the start, but after you understand the basic components and it's working, the whole procedure really seems very easy. Very complex applications can be developed using these simple functionalities. But we need to remember that it is Easy to Learn Hard to Master technology.

• React Native: Most web applications also need a mobile application of the same, and we all know how hard it is to make a mobile application, that too for 2 different architectures Android and IOS, but this problem can also be solved by learning ReactJS, because there is a technology called React Native used to build mobile apps for both Android and IOS, by using the ReactJS methodologies. So learning ReactJS will also make you a mobile application developer.

• Highly Scalable and Flexible: ReactJs can be used with many other libraries which provide a wide variety of functionalities and features, We need to understand this because ReactJs is not a framework but it's a library, that's where the power of using it with other libraries comes into the picture. Because Framework mostly has all the features and are need to be written in only one way, whereas Libraries can be used as per developer needs.

Disadvantages of Using ReactJS

• Steep Learning Curve: It Has a steep learning curve, its easy to learn ReactJs but hard to master, we can also say that we know how to build the application using react, but always seems something is missing or some functionality needed to be added, It might take a lot of time and practice to master this technology.

• FrontEnd Library: It's only a Frontend Technology which means you need to learn another technology for working in the backend, like ExpressJs or React Frameworks like NextJS. ReactJs can be used when we want to develop single-page applications or static applications.

• Not SEO-friendly:  This is one of the major concerns of ReactJs, that web applications like blog sites cannot be made using ReactJS, which Means it's not much SEO friendly. This can be understood by an easy example. Suppose you send a blog link to someone, when you send a link a small image and descriptions will be visible, But when applications are made by ReactJS needed to be rendered, all the javascript needed to be processed. So, all the crawlers and google bots cant read our blog's data, which will reduce the ranking of our blog. This can be solved by using NextJs, which uses server-side rendering to solve this problem.

• Frequent Changes: As we said its a fast phase languages and bugs and issues are fixed in a constant phase, which also means there can be considerable updates in a less span of time, for example, the update which introduced ES6 actually changed a lot of development style in ReactJS, which means we need to constantly stay updated and change the application to the current patch.