What are the Pros and Cons of React
If you are a web developer, you are a JavaScript developer–by choice or by force. I mention by force because not many web developers like to work with vanilla JavaScript, especially ones who have worked with frameworks and languages where Object Oriented concepts are made easier for developers to work with. But this does not stop JavaScript from becoming the most widely used language in the world. The popularity of JavaScript has been growing rapidly over the past years.
For any web development, a lot of the work gets done by JavaScript at the user’s browser and at times it becomes difficult to manage vanilla JavaScript in large applications as it lacks the structure which developers enjoy in languages like Java, C# at the back end.
Technology leaders identified this problem, and they came up with multiple solutions to make JavaScript not just easier to work with but also to give it performance boost and empowering browsers to do lot more without having to worry about managing complex state of applications as they grow to meet customer demand. React is one such solution along with Angular and Vue.
ReactJS is a component-based JavaScript library created by Facebook. React makes it easier to create interactive UI using components and efficiently manage states of those components. Multiple components can be composed together to make complex applications without losing their state in DOM.
Even though we are talking about React as a tool for web application here, it can also be used for mobile application development with React Native, a powerful and open-source native library for mobile application.
This is how a simple React component looks like.
Being one of the most popular JavaScript libraries, React can be used to create anything you see on the web. It can be used for multiple requirements; be it a simple but interactive app like Instagram, or a complex streaming app with large userbase and support for multiple languages and regions like Netflix or an application like Facebook, with very large dataset and high complexity with the power to process more than a billion users’ requests parallelly.
However, it is not just limited to highly scalable web applications, and you can also create mobile applications using React Native which is an open-source mobile application framework. You can create Android, iOS and Windows apps using this framework. In fact, the above-mentioned web applications “Instagram, Facebook, Netflix” mobile apps are also created using React Native. It gives developers a rich library to utilize the native features of a device to deliver high performance and highly interactive applications to users across the world.
It is not uncommon for vanilla JavaScript based apps to get into a stage, when managing state of data at user’s browser becomes a headache for developers. As the data and complexity of an application grow, it becomes difficult to maintain using vanilla JavaScript.
The introduction of React components brings a highly sophisticated unit of a web page which can be independently created, maintained, and even reused. You can divide your web page into multiple components, and they can work independently. You can update one of them without having to worry about changes in others. This makes it very loosely coupled and at the same time available for working together by merging with other components to bring out the best of the web application’s abilities.
This is not something unique in React library. In fact, components are the basic building blocks in the Angular framework as well, and a similar concept has been there in many MVC frameworks since a long time.
With component-based architecture, React allows to create highly scaled Single Page Application or SPA, in which content is dynamically loaded during user interaction without loading the entire page. However, this can turn into a trap. Imagine having to update DOM for every change caused by user’s interaction on web page. Every action might force DOM (which is a tree structure) to refresh itself. And if your web page is complex, having multiple UI components this can cause massive performance blockage.
To solve this, React uses the concept of Virtual DOM, which you can think of as a copy of your real DOM. Now all the changes caused by user’s interaction or other events are handled by the virtual DOM first, and only if it (the intelligence of React) thinks it is important enough to refresh the real DOM, the real DOM is refreshed. This saves us from massively repeating recreation of the DOM tree for every trivial change resulting in high performance application.
Back to our SPA (Single Page Application), where there are multiple components sitting on one page and updated dynamically without reloading the entire page. Now all this sounds very simple and smooth. Which it is, until your components start talking to each other. Let’s say you have a web page where there are few form components which contains large forms with lot of controls, few table components, and a sidebar and header, footer. Content in tables must be updated when user submits form or part of forms. Also, you might want to update header when a new record is created. Now here, our table components have dependency on form components. These dependencies, along with communication between them can grow as your application grows.
All this can make our data unstable as there is no way to know which data is latest or which is correct. There is no single source of data. This can cause poor user experience and also performance issues.
To make sure that all your components are in sync with latest data, we need to have a—let’s just call it— a ‘manager’ who manages our data, and provides a single trustworthy source which makes sure the data which the components have is correct and truthful. This manager and its team are known as Redux in React.
Redux forces components to avoid talking to each other directly or being dependent on each other, instead components send their data to redux and it is the responsibility of redux to update the components (which need those data) with new data. This way components are always updated with the latest data available without having to depend on each other.
This is another pro of working with React as any developer with understanding of html and JavaScript can start learning React. Unlike other JS frameworks like Angular which introduce a lot of new terminologies, React uses most of what is already available. This makes it very easy to start with—another reason why it has grown to be the most popular JS library.
It provides more flexibility (which it derives from Vanilla JavaScript) and does not force developers to follow any specific pattern like MVC or any other architectural pattern. Development teams are free to choose their own style or patterns while working with an application. This allows vanilla JavaScript developers to work with component-based architecture without having to lose the freedom they enjoyed with vanilla JavaScript.
In a world where every platform, and every stack of an application requires you to learn a whole new tool or language or frameworks; React brings us the flexibility of using the same library over web and mobile applications. React Native allows us to create mobile applications on any mobile platform with the same React concepts and syntaxes. React Native helps you create interactive and high-performance mobile apps for any mobile device without having to learn a new tool or language.
So far, we talked about what makes React so popular among development teams, but every technology has pros and cons. Let’s talk about why many teams are not willing to work with React and what makes it less reliable when you need a well-structured and stable JS library to work with.
This is arguably the most discussed con of using React. React is not just a rapidly growing library, it is also rapidly changing, which forces its developers to update the way they write code. Now this is obviously annoying for most of the developers who are not comfortable with adopting new ways every Monday they start or the ones who are working on an application where changes are critical to customers. There are many industries which are critical to change where customers look for more stable tools and technologies. But this again depends on how expert team members are and if they can convince their customers to trust them with React.
Yes, you read it right. I know that we discussed it as an advantage of using React, but at the same time it is also a disadvantage in a broader sense. Libraries, languages, or frameworks have their global standards of how developers work with them, and what styles or patterns they follow. This is useful because when developers change teams, they have an idea of what patterns or styles the new team might be following; whereas among React development teams it is not easy to predict what styles or standards a team might follow, making it harder for new developers to work with new teams and their standards. Developers who have worked with frameworks which follow a fixed structure and set of conventions might not find React very attractive to work with.
Even though React is a rich JavaScript library with a set of interactive and useful features required for creating large scale applications, developers do not enjoy what they can have in a fully featured framework such as Angular (another popular JS Framework). If you look at the MVC (Model View Controller) architecture, React only handles the view part. For Controller and Model you need additional libraries, and tools. This can result in poor structure of code, and its patterns. Whereas frameworks like Angular provide the complete MVC featured ground, which is more structured, and well managed.
This all sounds like jQuery again. When we talk about empowering JavaScript to structure like we do our code at backend, arguably you might be looking for a full featured, well-structured tool where similar practices and patterns are followed globally, and this is where React might not be very helpful. If not careful, you might end up having the same problem which React claims to resolve. It needs a quite deeper understanding of JavaScript and its core behaviors to make React work the way you want it to. Whereas working with Frameworks like Angular (although it is more difficult to learn than React) force developers to follow a strict structure where you enjoy similar patterns as backend development.
Since React is changing so fast, new tools and patterns are adding up every now and then, and it is becoming difficult for the community to maintain the documentation. This makes it difficult to work with for new developers who want to start with React. Lack of poor documentation can also result in slower development among teams with less experienced developers.
React has introduced JSX to work with html, and JavaScript. This is like JavaScript and html syntax, and allows to mix html and JavaScript together but has some new attributes and syntaxes, which makes it difficult to work with when you start with React. For example, while working with class attribute, in JSX it becomes className. Also, the lack of rich documentation makes it more difficult to work with JSX.
This is what a JSX looks like while creating a simple login form.
If you are building an application in React which is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sensitive where the popularity of your application, its appearance and ranking in Google search results are priorities, then this, although not proven, is a concern. The concern is about ability of search engine crawlers to list dynamically loaded content. There are tools available to test your app for SEO results and rankings.
Conclusion
Honestly, there is no solid conclusion on whether these pros or cons can be summed up to decide if you should or should not go with React. It entirely depends on customer needs, domain needs and expertise in your team. With the right team of experts React can be implemented at its best, overcoming its cons like “rapid change or lack of documentation and lack of convention”. A team of expert developers can agree to follow a convention, document the practices and patterns they are following for any future developers who might join their team. With all these covered, React has a number of advantages including “Hight performance using Virtual DOM, State Management using Redux”, which you can use to make the best of web and mobile apps available today.
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