Overview

React

Stacks178.2K

Followers147.0K

Votes4.1K

GitHub Stars240.3K

Forks49.7K

Vanilla.JS

Stacks82

Followers85

Votes9

React vs Vanilla.JS: What are the differences?

Introduction:

In the realm of web development, React and Vanilla Javascript are two commonly used tools for building interactive user interfaces. While Vanilla JavaScript is the core language of the web, React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Understanding the key differences between React and Vanilla JavaScript can help developers decide which tool is best suited for their project needs.

Component-Based vs. Procedural Programming: React is component-based, allowing developers to create reusable UI components that can be easily managed and updated. In contrast, Vanilla JavaScript follows a procedural programming approach, where the code is written sequentially to achieve the desired functionality without the concept of components.
Virtual DOM vs. DOM Manipulation: React uses a virtual DOM (Document Object Model) to optimize performance by updating only the necessary components that have changed, minimizing the direct manipulation of the actual DOM. On the other hand, Vanilla JavaScript relies on directly manipulating the DOM, which can be less efficient for large-scale applications.
Efficient State Management: React provides a built-in state management system, making it easier to manage and update the data within components through the use of component state and props. Vanilla JavaScript does not have a built-in state management system, requiring developers to handle state changes manually, which can lead to more complex code.
JSX Syntax vs. Plain JavaScript: In React, JSX (JavaScript XML) is used to write markup in JavaScript files, allowing developers to create UI components in a declarative and more readable manner. Vanilla JavaScript, on the other hand, requires developers to write HTML and JavaScript separately, which can be less intuitive for building complex user interfaces.
Learning Curve: React has a steeper learning curve compared to Vanilla JavaScript, especially for beginners, due to its use of additional concepts like JSX, virtual DOM, and component-based architecture. Vanilla JavaScript, being the core language of the web, has a lower barrier to entry in terms of understanding basic concepts and syntax.
Community Support and Ecosystem: React has a robust ecosystem with a large community of developers contributing to libraries, tools, and resources that enhance the development experience. Vanilla JavaScript, while more versatile, may lack specialized libraries and frameworks for specific tasks compared to the rich ecosystem that surrounds React.

In Summary, understanding the differences between React and Vanilla JavaScript can help developers choose the right tool for building interactive and efficient web applications.

Advice on React, Vanilla.JS

Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceon

Vue.js

React

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?

883k views883k

Comments

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

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	Vanilla.JS
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.	It is a fast and cross-platform framework for building incredible, powerful JavaScript applications. it is the most lightweight framework available anywhere.
Declarative; Component-based; Learn once, write anywhere	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 240.3K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 49.7K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 178.2K	Stacks 82
Followers 147.0K	Followers 85
Votes 4.1K	Votes 9
Pros & Cons
Pros 837 Components 673 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 2 Web-components 2 Lightweight 1 Easy to learn 1 Unopinionated 1 NO CONVENTIONS Cons 2 You need to build anything yourself

What are some alternatives to React, Vanilla.JS?

jQuery

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Kendo UI

Fast, light, complete: 70+ jQuery-based UI widgets in one powerful toolset. AngularJS integration, Bootstrap support, mobile controls, offline data solution.