Many people argue that React is not a beginner friendly framework due to its complexity. Their criteria for judging is usually based on certain myths that freely roam around React ecosystem. In this short article, we will discuss and demystify five common myths that are associated with React. So let's start our short journey!
In the first sentence of this article, I said that React is a framework. I was wrong. According to Facebook, "React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces." - a library, not a framework. So what's the difference? Frameworks like Angular or Ember.js are all-around solutions for building web applications. Unlike React, they provide many features out of the box. What distinguishes React from the rest is its ability to handle the view layer of the application. A React application is made out of components that in theory should be pure functions - meaning that they return the same view for the given input. That being said, React in its purest form shouldn't care about where and how the data comes to the view.