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  1. Stackups
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  3. UI Components
  4. Javascript UI Libraries
  5. React vs React Router

React vs React Router

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

React
React
Stacks182.6K
Followers147.0K
Votes4.1K
GitHub Stars240.3K
Forks49.7K
React Router
React Router
Stacks5.2K
Followers1.1K
Votes14

React vs React Router: What are the differences?

Introduction:

React and React Router are both popular tools in the world of web development but serve different purposes. React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, while React Router is a standard routing library for React applications. Understanding the key differences between the two can help developers make informed decisions about which tool to use in their projects.

  1. Rendering vs. Navigation: React is primarily focused on rendering user interfaces by creating reusable UI components, managing state, and handling events. On the other hand, React Router is used for managing navigation within a React application, handling routing and displaying different components based on the URL.

  2. Single-page vs. Multi-page Applications: React is well-suited for building single-page applications (SPAs) where content is dynamically loaded without full page reloads. In contrast, React Router is commonly used for multi-page applications to control navigation between different pages by defining routes and rendering components accordingly.

  3. Component Composition vs. Routing Configuration: In React, developers create component hierarchies by composing smaller, reusable components to build complex user interfaces. React Router, on the other hand, focuses on configuring routes using a declarative syntax to map URLs to specific components, allowing for dynamic content rendering based on the current route.

  4. State Management vs. Route Parameters: React provides tools for managing component state locally or with libraries like Redux for global state management. React Router allows developers to pass route parameters, query strings, and other data through the URL to dynamically update component content based on the provided information.

  5. Integration with Other Libraries: React can be integrated with various libraries and tools such as Redux, Axios, and Material-UI to enhance functionality and design capabilities. React Router is often used in conjunction with React to handle client-side routing while seamlessly integrating with other state management and API fetching libraries.

  6. Performance Optimization: React offers features like virtual DOM, memoization, and code splitting for optimizing rendering performance and improving user experience. React Router focuses on efficient routing and navigation handling, providing tools like lazy loading components, prefetching data, and nested route structures to enhance overall application performance.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between React and React Router can help developers choose the right tool for building user interfaces and managing navigation within their web applications.

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Advice on React, React Router

Cyrus
Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceonVue.jsVue.jsReactReact

I find using Vue.js to be easier (more concise / less boilerplate) and more intuitive than writing React. However, there are a lot more readily available React components that I can just plug into my projects. I'm debating whether to use Vue.js or React for an upcoming project that I'm going to use to help teach a friend how to build an interactive frontend. Which would you recommend I use?

884k views884k
Comments
Cyrus
Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs advice

Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"] would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.

For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.

How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...

401k views401k
Comments
Malek
Malek

Web developer at Quicktext

Mar 28, 2020

Decided

The project is a web gadget previously made using vanilla script and JQuery, It is a part of the "Quicktext" platform and offers an in-app live & customizable messaging widget. We made that remake with React eco-system and Typescript and we're so far happy with results. We gained tons of TS features, React scaling & re-usabilities capabilities and much more!

What do you think?

244k views244k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

React
React
React Router
React Router

Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

React Router is a complete routing solution designed specifically for React.js. It painlessly synchronizes the components of your application with the URL, with first-class support for nesting, transitions, and server side rendering.

Declarative; Component-based; Learn once, write anywhere
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
240.3K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
49.7K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
182.6K
Stacks
5.2K
Followers
147.0K
Followers
1.1K
Votes
4.1K
Votes
14
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 837
    Components
  • 674
    Virtual dom
  • 579
    Performance
  • 509
    Simplicity
  • 442
    Composable
Cons
  • 41
    Requires discipline to keep architecture organized
  • 30
    No predefined way to structure your app
  • 29
    Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages
  • 13
    JSX
  • 10
    Not enterprise friendly
Pros
  • 14
    Because there's not alternative

What are some alternatives to React, React Router?

jQuery

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

AngularJS

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vue.js

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

jQuery UI

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

Svelte

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Ant Design

Ant Design

An enterprise-class UI design language and React-based implementation. Graceful UI components out of the box, base on React Component. A npm + webpack + babel + dora + dva development framework.

Flux

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.

Famo.us

Famo.us

Famo.us is a free and open source JavaScript platform for building mobile apps and desktop experiences. What makes Famo.us unique is its JavaScript rendering engine and 3D physics engine that gives developers the power and tools to build native quality apps and animations using pure JavaScript.

Riot

Riot

Riot brings custom tags to all browsers. Think React + Polymer but with enjoyable syntax and a small learning curve.

Marko

Marko

Marko is a really fast and lightweight HTML-based templating engine that compiles templates to readable Node.js-compatible JavaScript modules, and it works on the server and in the browser. It supports streaming, async rendering and custom tags.

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