If you’re not new to mobile or web development, chances are you’re already familiar with React.js and React Native. Both React.js and its Native counterpart boast a lot of benefits and are famed for their ability to harmoniously operate in united ecosystems and create complex user interfaces.
Still, if you’re only considering building a robust web or mobile app, you might want to take a closer look at these tools, their functions, and advantages. For more exhaustive information on React.js and React Native’s differences, go to https://litslink.com/blog/react-and-react-native-whats-the-difference.
What is React.js?
React.js, or React for short, is essentially a JavaScript-based front-end development library commonly utilized for creating interactive scalable user interfaces and web applications. Though React is mainly referred to as a library, it also has some great framework features, which makes it a universal and more flexible web development tool.
React relies on Document Object Model (DOM), which is a representation of application architecture, to provide you with the UI pieces, which you can assemble and reuse as required. By effectively manipulating the DOM, React allows for rendering shorter and lighter code and creating highly dynamic and responsive web applications faster.
What is React Native?
Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with React, it’s time for you to learn more about its framework – React Native. As its name suggests, React Native has been designed specifically to help engineers build active natively-rendered mobile applications for multiple platforms. What you do in Native is use real native components and APIs to interact with the code, which is very similar to the React code you would create for the web.
Indeed, React Native’s architectures, and main structural principles are very similar to those of React.js. But they are in no way identical. Unlike React, which empowers you to reuse the blocks of code, React Native transforms the web code for your future mobile apps into general-purpose languages. Native makes it possible to design full-blown native solutions for iOS (C Objective) and Android (Java).
Why Use React.js?
Since React.js is a great choice for those developers that want to create scalable apps. It helps manage the growing web codebase by shifting all the rendering processes to the virtual DOM. This spares you the bother of updating your DOM every time you add new functionality to your app.
As it has already been mentioned, React provides you with a great opportunity to reuse you code, meaning you don’t have to write new pieces of code when working on the same functionality.
React’s rigid codebase hierarchy makes coding and testing your app faster and more intuitive. With its reliance on downward data binding, React enables coders to incorporate changes to the upper architecture layers without disrupting the lower ones. So, should any tweak be made, you can merely edit child code without altering any parent components. This helps to reduce the probability of occurrence of unwanted dependencies and bugs and allows speeding up the overall development process.
Currently, React.js is considered one of the most popular and widely used libraries in the world. React.js boasts a rich collection of tools like add-ons, webpacks, and helpful documentation, which makes it a universal tool for building mobile and hybrid apps, various interactive elements on websites, SPAs, and even television apps.
Why Use React Native?
React Native is younger than its JS counterpart. Hence, a smaller number of uses. Still, this in no way detracts from React Native’s benefits.
It wasn’t until React Native emerged that it became possible to easily render code with platform-specific APIs. With React Native, you’ll have a luxury of utilizing full-fledged mobile UI components, not just webviews, which will afford your application a native look and feel. What’s more, you’ll be able to access platform features like the phone camera, or the user’s location with React Native.
React’s set of platform-agnostic native tools make it possible to build robust mobile apps for different operating systems. With this framework, developers can separate their codebase into reusable and non-reusable chunks. This makes it possible to share code between platforms and simplify the process of simultaneously developing for both Android and iOS.
React.js uses JSX while Native doesn’t, but many features remain very similar, including the downward dataflow. So, if you’ve ever developed digital solutions with React.js, it won’t be a problem to master React Native. Or if you have some developers, familiar with React’s components and development tools, working on your app, you can try to hire the same team to build a React Native solution.
Now you can choose the best tool that can help you put together an effective application well suited to your specific business needs.
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