React and React Native are among the most popular technologies used to create various types of applications owing to the fact that they are developed by the same company.
React and React Native is very much similar yet different from each other, so hey guys welcome and in today’s post we’re going to differentiate between React and React Native. We’ll start the session by understanding what is react and the features of React then we shall take a look at React Native and its features finally we’ll do a head-to-head comparison between React and React Native.
What exactly is React?
React is a JavaScript library that is used to build the user interface for web applications react.js was developed by Jordan walk a software engineer working at Facebook Facebook implemented React.js in 2011 in its news feed section but it was released to the public on May 2013.
After the implementation of React Facebook’s UI underwent drastic improvement which resulted in satisfied users and a sudden boost in its popularity, not just that, React is also used in other Facebook applications such as WhatsApp, Instagram, etc popular websites like Netflix, Airbnb, Dropbox, etc make use of React to build their UI.
It is currently one of the most popular JavaScript front-end libraries which has a strong foundation and a large community supporting it. StackOverflow developer survey 2020 shows that React is the second most loved web framework just after asp.net core, not just that react also tops the list of most Wanted web Frameworks since react is only a front-end library and not the whole framework.
How does React work?
It deals only with the View component of the MVC or the model view controller architecture. In React everything is a component consider one Lego house as an entire application then compare each of the Lego blocks to the component which acts as a building block these blocks or components are integrated together to build one bigger and more dynamic application.
The biggest advantage of using components is that you can change any component at any point in time without affecting the rest of the application this feature is most effective when implemented with larger and real-time applications where the data changes frequently each time any data is added or updated react automatically updates the specific component whose state has actually changed. This saves the browser from the task of reloading the whole application to reflect the changes.
Talking about the features of React JSX, JSX stands for JavaScript XML it is an XML HTML-like syntax used by React it extends the ECMAScript so that XML or HTML-like text can co-exist along with the JavaScript react code this syntax is used by the preprocessors like Babel to transform HTML like text found in JavaScript files into standard JavaScript objects.
With JSX, you can go a step further by again embedding the HTML code inside the JavaScript this makes HTML code easy to understand and boosts JavaScript performance while making our application robust Virtual DOM like an Actual DOM. Virtual DOM is also a node tree that lists the elements and their attributes and content as objects and their properties react render function creates a node tree out of the react components then it updates this tree in response to the mutations in the data model caused by various actions done either by the user or byte system.
What exactly is React Native?
So now moving on towards React Native, React Native is a cross-platform mobile application development framework React Native was also created by Facebook. It makes use of JavaScript as the base language. Over the years JavaScript has gained immense popularity due to the ease in learning and widespread usage if someone is well versed with JavaScript they can start developing applications using React Native without wasting much time getting accustomed to the framework.
How does React Native work?
React Native’s architecture heavily relies on JavaScript runtime environment architecture also known as JavaScript Bridge, the JavaScript code is compiled into native code at runtime. React Native uses flux architecture from Facebook, in short React Native uses JavaScript bridge to communicate with the native modules.
With React Native, a developer is just provided with UI rendering and device access modules for Native features. React Native is heavily dependent on third-party libraries and modules.
Coming towards the features of React Native- write once and use everywhere this is React Native’s base feature it means that the code written in React Native can be used on any of the mobile platforms to build native applications or applications that work on multiple platforms language.
As mentioned earlier react native makes use of JavaScript which is one of the most popular and widely used web development languages for every web developer JavaScript is a must-have skill what’s more this Ultra essential skill is very easy to learn and to implement.
When it comes to Community Support React Native surely has a diverse community that even Hosts International meetups plugins, when you make use of React Native you have a great advantage of adding additional third-party packages or plugins that you would like to use in your application.
The live reload feature is one of the best features that assists the developer while creating the application using live reload you will be able to modify the code as well as see the modifications
React Native is cost efficient when it comes to testing it provides a few unit testing functionalities through JavaScript Frameworks and snapshot testing can be done using tools like jest for other sorts of testing applications built using React Native heavily depend on third-party applications
React vs React Native – Conclusion
React is just a library of JavaScript therefore when you use React you will need various other tools for setup and development live reload live reload or hot reload as mentioned earlier is a feature that allows you to code as well as see the modifications in your application simultaneously React Native supports live reload whereas React does not template rendering both React and React Native use jsx for the development of views or the templates but React is much better when it comes to styling your application’s UI using CSS React Native on the other hand makes use of Native platform apis learning curve even though React is not very difficult to learn React Native is much easier this is because you can make use of ready-made components in React Native while for React you will have to coach them yourself so we’ve done a head-to-head comparison between React and React Native the answer to which one is better among the two depends on the type of project that you’re creating if you are focusing on creating the UI for a web application then React is what you need but if your project is going to be a mobile application then you can go with React Native this brings us to the end of the article.
