History of React
The early prototype of React
2011
React was originally developed by Jordan Walke who was a software engineer at Facebook. At that time, Facebook Ads start to have big momentum, their code started to see a myriad of new updates and team members which became a problem for them. Then Jordan Walke created FaxJS, the early prototype of React which made this process more efficient (ReactJS: A Brief History. A Peak into the Evolution of One of The… | by Stephen Arancio | Medium, n.d.).
2012
Something new had started at Facebook
Facebook bought a company called Instagram for $1 Billion (ReactJS: A Brief History. A Peak into the Evolution of One of The… | by Stephen Arancio | Medium, n.d.). After its acquisition, Instagram wanted to use Facebook’s new technology, and this put pressure on Facebook to decouple React from Facebook and make it open-source (The History of React.Js on a Timeline - RisingStack Engineering, n.d.).
The year of React launched
2013
Jordan Walke introduced React and open-sourced the material. The entire of the year, React started to use and experimented across the industry (ReactJS: A Brief History. A Peak into the Evolution of One of The… | by Stephen Arancio | Medium, n.d.).
React is Stable
2015
2014
The year of Expansion
React started to become popular as some important new features like React Development Tools were added as an extension for the Chrome Developer Tools. React Hot Loader was also introduced this year, it was a plugin that let React components to be live reloaded without the loss of state (History of ReactJS - Great Learning, n.d.).
React was now considered ‘Stable’. In January 2015, Netflix came out with an article to support React. Airbnb also started using React after that. Significant developments were followed by React Native for iOS available on Github by March and then React Native for Android also available in September of the same year (ReactJS: A Brief History. A Peak into the Evolution of One of The… | by Stephen Arancio | Medium, n.d.).
Why was React invented?
Clear UI
React can help to make building and maintaining the user interface easier and more efficient as React let developers to create reusable UI components. React allows developers to declaratively describe their user interface that can help to make the code easier to understand and debug (History of ReactJS - Great Learning, n.d.).
Efficient DOM Manipulation
React uses a virtual DOM, a lightweight in-memory representation of the actual DOM to optimize updates to the actual DOM, which can help to improve the performance of the applications that is rely on frequent updates (History of ReactJS - Great Learning, n.d.).
Strong
Ecosystem
React was designed as a library that is focusing purely on the view layer. This flexibility allowed developers to pair with different tools like React Router for adding routing to React apps, and Redux for managing application state
(The History of React.Js on a Timeline - RisingStack Engineering, n.d.).