Written by: Daniel Haurey on 07/30/19

My years spent developing custom software have taught me many things. Among those things is that managing and maintaining JavaScript code in complex applications can, if not carefully done, quickly become a nightmare. After spending years struggling with common JavaScript and browser compatibility issues, I have come to appreciate just how important properly structured JavaScript code is. Thankfully, there are many solutions to this problem, but the most notable of these is React.

React is a modern JavaScript library that offers tremendous benefit for developing the front-end for applications. Originally released in 2013, React has quickly become an industry-leading framework and is used by some of the largest tech companies including Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, and Salesforce.

A key component of React is its use of the virtual DOM (VDOM), a programming concept that maintains a virtual representation of the UI that is kept in memory. By leveraging VDOM, React can be used to create fast, highly-responsive applications that are far more user-friendly over applications that use traditional JavaScript. In addition, React allows custom software developers to spend their time more efficiently by utilizing a component-based architecture. This helps speed up the development process and lends itself to stable, maintainable software code. As an added benefit, React applications are SEO friendly with the ability to deal with common search engine failures from traditional JavaScript-heavy applications.

Here at Exigent, we have fully adopted using React in our current and new development efforts. Apart from the obvious benefits of using React, a key asset of React that made adopting this technology an easy decision for us was the ability to write robust suites of unit and integration tests against the front-end. This combined with our extensive expertise in .NET Framework and .NET Core has allowed us to leverage the full capabilities of .NET while taking advantage of the numerous benefits of React on our front-end. The result is blazing fast, highly-maintainable, SEO friendly web applications with stable, ascetically pleasing UI’s.

Exigent Technologies provides a full suite of custom software development services in the NYC, NJ Tri-state area including Java, MySQL, and PHP.