React

React looms large in the web development world for good reason. It can be used to build apps and widgets of all sizes, from tiny drop-in widgets to full-fledged feature-rich applications. It can be used to build native mobile applications via React Native. Its ability to give developers control over what loads when to optimize load times is legendary. And here at Harmonic Northwest, we love it.

Component-based architecture

React uses a component-based architecture that encourages the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle and reusability, which facilitates faster coding and leads to a more manageable and coherent codebase. In React, generally all of the parts of a UI component are in one place—the HTML markup, CSS, and custom JavaScript—making it so that you don’t have to hunt around forever to figure out what files are making that widget break.

The fastest framework on the block

React selectively updates the part of the virtual DOM needed to make updates, which allows for very granular and fast UI changes. So you can say goodbye to lengthy page refreshes and say hello to laser quick UI responses.

Cross-platform compatible

Want an app that runs both on the web at your company URL and on the phone as a native application that is downloadable from the app store? With React Native, this is no problem. You can use react to have a single codebase for a full range of devices and use cases and avoid the burden of maintaining multiple codebases specific to particular platforms.

Designed for developers

While there are a few frameworks out there that are slightly faster than React, none can match its flexibility and developer-friendliness. Developers love its declarative approach to handling state, the separation of concerns via modularity and its ability to be used in a huge variety of situations.

Amazing libraries

A large, dedicated community React developers is constantly creating and improving libraries that power up React’s capabilities. Redux adeptly handles state management. Next.js allows for server-side rendering. React Router assigns URLs to content and state. Chakra UI, Material UI and Tailwind CSS can be used to quickly scaffold and style UI components while Styled Components allow for creating a layer of descriptive abstraction to more easily manage style variations within components.