Top 10 Important Features, Libraries and Frameworks for Building React Applications

ReactJS is a popular JavaScript library used for building user interfaces. It was developed by Facebook and is now maintained by a community of developers. ReactJS uses a component-based architecture, where complex user interfaces are broken down into smaller, reusable components. 

Here are the top 10 libraries and frameworks you must know if you’re a React developer:

• React Hooks: React Hooks are a feature introduced in React version 16.8. They allow developers to use state and other React features without writing a class component. Prior to the introduction of hooks, stateful logic could only be used in class components. Hooks are functions that allow you to “hook into” React features like state, lifecycle methods, and context from functional components. The most commonly used hooks are useState, useEffect, useContext, and useReducer.
• Next.js: Next.js is an open-source framework built on top of React that allows for server-side rendering, static site generation, and other advanced features. It was developed by Vercel (formerly Zeit) and is used by many companies for building web applications.Next.js provides a streamlined developer experience with features such as automatic code splitting, client-side and server-side rendering, and hot module replacement. It also includes a pre-configured web pack and Babel configurations, making it easy to use with different types of projects.Next.js supports server-side rendering, which means that pages can be rendered on the server and sent as fully-formed HTML pages to the client. This can improve performance and SEO by reducing the time to first meaningful paint.
• Server-Side Render: Server-side rendering (SSR) is the process of generating HTML on the server and sending it to the client as a fully-formed page. In a traditional client-side rendering (CSR) setup, the page is initially rendered on the client side by downloading the JavaScript and rendering it in the browser. This can result in a slower initial load time and poor SEO. With SSR, the server sends back HTML that is immediately rendered by the browser, which improves the perceived performance and also provides better SEO since search engines can more easily crawl the page.
• React Redux: React Redux is a library that provides a predictable state container for JavaScript applications. It’s designed to work with the React framework and can be used to manage the state of a React application in a predictable way. Redux follows a unidirectional data flow architecture, where the state is stored in a central store and can only be modified through actions. An action is a plain JavaScript object that describes what should change in the state. Actions are dispatched to a store, which updates the state based on the action.
• Formik: Formik is a library for building forms in React applications. It provides a set of utilities and components that make it easier to manage form states, handle form submissions, and display form validation errors. Formik is designed to work with React’s component model, allowing developers to use the same techniques they use for building other React components when building forms. It provides a simple API that abstracts away many of the complexities of form handling, such as form submission, error handling, and input validation.
• React – Query: React Query is a library for managing remote data in React applications. It provides a simple and intuitive API for fetching, caching, and updating data from remote sources like APIs, databases, and GraphQL endpoints. React Query is designed to be flexible and easy to use. It supports many features like query caching, automatic data refetching, pagination, and real-time updates. It also provides a simple way to manage data mutations, such as create, update, and delete operations.
• React – virtualized: React Virtualized is a library for efficiently rendering large sets of data in React applications. It provides a set of reusable components that can be used to display large datasets in a performant way. When dealing with large datasets, traditional rendering approaches can lead to poor performance and slow rendering times. React Virtualized solves this problem by using a technique called “virtualization”, where only the visible portion of the dataset is rendered at any given time.
• React – Spring: React Spring is a library that provides a simple and powerful way to create animations in React applications. It is built on top of the Spring physics library and provides a declarative and easy-to-use API for creating animations. React Spring allows developers to create a wide range of animations, including simple transitions, complex sequences, and physics-based animations. It supports a variety of properties such as opacity, scale, and position, and allows developers to easily combine and chain animations to create more complex effects.
• React – Testing Library: React Testing Library is a library for testing React components in a way that is more closely aligned with how users interact with the application. It provides a set of utilities that make it easy to write tests that focus on the behavior and functionality of the components, rather than their implementation details. React Testing Library is built on top of the DOM Testing Library, which provides a set of utilities for testing DOM nodes. It adds additional functionality specifically for testing React components, such as rendering the components in a test environment, simulating user interactions, and making assertions about the state and behavior of the components.
• TypeScript: TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that adds optional static type-checking to the language. It allows developers to catch errors and bugs at compile time, rather than the runtime, and provides a range of other features to help improve the quality and maintainability of code. With TypeScript, developers can specify the types of variables, function parameters, and return values, as well as define interfaces and classes with typed properties and methods. This helps catch errors and bugs early on, before the code is even run and makes it easier to reason about the behavior of the code.

So, these are the 10 libraries and frameworks you should know and Learn about the simple and intuitive APIs each library offers, and how they can help you build performant, scalable, and organized React applications.