React & Redux: Using Them For Developing Amazing UIs

Whether we are scrolling through our phones, navigating a website, controlling the car displays, or even using the controllers of our thermostats, it is the user interfaces that make up our experience on the screens. Digital displays on the black screens are all around us and constitute the majority of our online experience. In order to make the users stay and engage with the interface, it is imperative that businesses focus their attention on developing an amazing user interface or UI. A great way to make your user interface more intuitive and easy-to-navigate are by integrating it with React and Redux. What are React and Redux and what are their benefits in UI of your application or product development? Keep reading to know more. 

What is React?

React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It is the view layer for web applications. At the heart of all the React applications are components. Choosing React for your web app development could be a great initiative as its components are self-contained modules that render some output.

What is Redux? 

Redux is a state management tool. While its mostly used with React, it can be used with any other JavaScript framework or library. It is a lightweight tool coming in at 2KB (including dependencies), and, therefore, does not make the application asset size bigger. 

Redux keeps the state of the application in store and each component can access any state that it needs from this store. 

How can React be used and what are its benefits? 

React is a way to build user interfaces. It is only concerned with the front-end. React makes user interfaces very easy to build by cutting each page into pieces. We call these pieces components.

A React component is a bit of code that represents a piece of the page. Each component is a JavaScript function that returns a piece of code that represents a piece of a web page. These functions are arranged in a  certain order, put together for the result, an intuitive UI for the web app development. 

• Putting Components Together: We can put React components inside other components. This is how a page can be built. 
• Class Components: The aforementioned components, which were written as functions, are called functional components. However, components can be written in another way, as JavaScript classes. These are called class components.

Why should React be used? 

The following are some of the reasons why React should be used: 

• Fast Learning Curve: React is very a simple and lightweight library that only deals with the view layer. Any Javascript development company can understand the basics and start developing a web application, using React. 
• Reusable Components: React provides a component-based structure. Tiny components like button, checkbox, dropdown etc., can be used to create wrapper components composed of those smaller components. And then higher-level wrapper components can be written. And, it goes on like that until you have this one root component and that component is your app.
• Fast render with Virtual DOM: Web application that involves high user interaction needs the consideration of the possible performance issues. Although JavaScript engines are fast enough to handle such complex applications, DOM manipulations are still not that fast. React is trying to solve this problem by using something called virtual DOM; a DOM kept in memory. Any view changes are first reflected Virtual DOM, which then, calculates the best way (minimum amount of updates needed) to apply these changes. 
• Clean Abstraction: One of the powerful sides of React is that it provides a good abstraction which means that it does not expose any complex internals to the user. A basic understanding of a component’s life cycles, states, and props are needed to master React. 
• Redux: It is a kind of reinterpretation of flux architecture. It provides a single store which is not required in flux.  There is only one single object where you keep all the application data. This makes it easier to observe and manipulate. 

Why should Redux be used?

Understanding how Redux works:

There is a central store that holds the entire state of the application. Each component can access the stored state without having to send down props from one component to another.

There are three building parts: actions, store, and reducers. 

• Actions in Redux:  Actions are events. They are the only way you can send data from your application to your Redux store. The data can be from user interactions, API calls or even form submission. Actions are sent using the store.dispatch() method. As pure functions, they do not change the data in the object passed to it or perform any side effect in the application.
• Store in Redux: The store holds the application state. There is only one store in any Redux application. You can access the state stored, update the state, and register or unregister listeners via helper methods. When using Redux with React, states will no longer need to be lifted up, hence it makes it easier for you to trace which action causes any change. 
• Reducers: Reducers, which are based on the reduce function (in JavaScript), are pure functions that take the current state of an application, perform an action and return a new state. These states are stored as objects and they specify how the state of an application changes in response to an action sent to the store.

Other benefits of using Redux:

• Redux makes the state predictable: In Redux, the state is always predictable. If the same state and action are passed to a reducer, the same result is always produced as reducers are pure functions. The state is also immutable and is never changed. This makes it possible to implement arduous tasks like infinite undo and redo. 
• Maintainability: Redux is strict about how code should be organized so it makes it easier for someone with knowledge of Redux to understand the structure of any Redux application. This generally makes it easier to maintain.
• Debuggable for days: Redux makes it easy to debug an application. By logging actions and state, it is easy to understand coding errors, network errors and other forms of bugs that might come up during production.
• Ease of testing: It is easy to test Redux apps as functions used to change the state of pure functions.
• Redux can also be used for server-side rendering: With Redux, you can handle the initial render of the app by sending the state of an app to the server along with its response to the server request. The required components are then rendered in HTML and sent to the clients.

In conclusion, React Development Services should be employed along with Redux, as Redux makes it easier for web development to take place. This is because, a basic knowledge JavaScript is necessary for utilizing Redux and it is a state management tool that holds the entire application, that is being created. In order to ensure proper setup of Redux and other front-end technologies and their variations, a front-end development company should be employed. Finally, in the expanding digital-age applying React and integrating it with Redux would prove beneficial for companies in their user-interactions.