What is React?
React is a JavaScript library that aims to simplify development of visual interfaces.
Developed at Facebook and released to the world in 2013, it drives some of the most widely used apps, powering Facebook and Instagram among countless other applications.
Its primary goal is to make it easy to reason about an interface and its state at any point in time, by dividing the UI into a collection of components.
Why is React so popular?
React has taken the frontend web development world by storm.
Less complex than the other alternatives
At the time when React was announced, Ember.js and Angular 1.x were the predominant choices as a framework. Both these imposed so many conventions on the code that porting an existing app was not convenient at all.
React made a choice to be very easy to integrate into an existing project, because that’s how they had to do it at Facebook in order to introduce it to the existing codebase. Also, those 2 frameworks brought too much to the table, while React only chose to implement the View layer instead of the full MVC stack.
Backed by Facebook
Being backed by Facebook is, of course, going to benefit a project if it turns out to be successful.
Facebook currently has a strong interest in React, sees the value of it being Open Source, and this is a huge plus for all the developers using it in their own projects.
How to install React on your development computer
How do you install React?
React is a library, so saying install might sound a bit weird. Maybe setup is a better word, but you get the concept.
There are various ways to setup React so that it can be used on your app or site.
