Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript, 7th Edition

Chapter 20. Introduction to React

When using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to build dynamic websites, there comes a time that the creation of the code required to handle the frontend of your websites and apps can become cumbersome and overly verbose, slowing down the speed of project development and potentially leading to the introduction of common bugs.

This is where frameworks come in. Of course, since 2006 there’s been jQuery to help us out, and consequently it’s still installed on many production websites, although these days JavaScript has grown sufficiently in scope and flexibility that programmers need to rely on frameworks like jQuery a lot less. Also, the technology continually improves, and now there are a number of excellent options, such as Angular and, as discussed here, my preferred favorite, React.

jQuery was designed to simplify HTML DOM tree traversal and manipulation, as well as event handling, CSS animation, and Ajax, but some programmers, such as the development team at Google, felt it still wasn’t powerful enough, and they came up with Angular JS in 2010, which evolved into Angular in 2016, and which overtook jQuery in around 2019.

Angular uses a hierarchy of components as its primary architectural characteristic. Google’s massive AdWords platform is powered by Angular, as are Forbes, Autodesk, Indiegogo, UPS, and many others, and it is indeed extremely powerful.

Facebook had a different vision and came up with React (also known as React JS) as its framework for ...