What is React

React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It lets you compose complex UIs from small and isolated pieces of code called “components”.

React has a few different kinds of components, but we’ll start with React.Component subclasses:

class ShoppingList extends React.Component {

render() {

return (

<div className=”shopping-list”>

<h1>Shopping List for {this.props.name}</h1>

<ul>

<li>Instagram</li>

<li>WhatsApp</li>

<li>Oculus</li>

</ul>

</div>

);

}

}

// Example usage: <ShoppingList name=”Mark” />

We’ll get to the funny XML-like tags soon. We use components to tell React what we want to see on the screen. When our data changes, React will efficiently update and re-render our components.

Here, ShoppingList is a React component class, or React component type. A component takes in parameters, called props (short for “properties”), and returns a hierarchy of views to display via the render method.

The render method returns a description of what you want to see on the screen. React takes the description and displays the result. In particular, render returns a React element, which is a lightweight description of what to render. Most React developers use a special syntax called “JSX” which makes these structures easier to write. The <div /> syntax is transformed at build time to React.createElement(‘div’). The example above is equivalent to:

return React.createElement(‘div’, {className: ‘shopping-list’},

React.createElement(‘h1’, /* … h1 children … */),

React.createElement(‘ul’, /* … ul children … */)

);

JSX comes with the full power of JavaScript. You can put any JavaScript expressions within braces inside JSX. Each React element is a JavaScript object that you can store in a variable or pass around in your program.

The ShoppingList component above only renders built-in DOM components like <div /> and <li />. But you can compose and render custom React components too. For example, we can now refer to the whole shopping list by writing <ShoppingList />. Each React component is encapsulated and can operate independently; this allows you to build complex UIs from simple components.