React Pros and Cons

React is a JavaScript library developed by Facebook that uses a mix of JavaScript and HTML, JSX (JavaScript Extension), to offer a new way of rendering webpages making them highly dynamic and responsive to user input.

Pros

Virtual DOM makes the website faster. React only updates the part of the DOM in which the component that has been rendered has been changed, without the need to re-render the entire webpage.

The ability to reuse React component saves time for developers and designers. When there is an update, only the component that has been updated will crash, making it much easier to debug.

React is an open-source library that’s always constantly developing and is open to the community.

You can use Redux with React, a state management tool. Redux is also used with other libraries like Angular, so it is commonly used outside of React as well. However, since React-Redux is relatively new, the documentation for it isn’t great and a lot of developers struggle with incorporating it into their apps, something that I’ve personally struggled with at first as well.

Cons

React is developing really quickly, and some developers just aren’t comfortable with the pace of learning and/or having to learn something new.

Since React is developing so quickly, the documentation for it isn’t great. Thus, a lot of developers write their own documentation for it for their apps.

JSX and HTML in Javascript looks junky to some people and looks like old code. However personally, I don’t find this to be much of an issue for myself. I quite like JSX and it seems pretty sleek to me.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a problem with most website building libraries. Since it’s not a typical website, it doesn’t come up as frequently or as accurately on search engines.

It’s all about balance. Overall though, React is still one of the most popular libraries out there right now for building websites.

Stay safe everyone!