Companies are constantly trying new ways to improve their products and services. To do so, companies often decide to invest in improving their tech stack. One framework that’s increasingly winning the hearts of developers is React.
React offers a lot of advantages when it is used for development purposes. Many well-known companies, including Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, and Instagram imply the tried and tested React web development practices for this framework. If you want to know more about companies using it, here’s a quick overview of 5 well-known brands that use React in some shape or form.
1-Twitter
Twitter is a very popular social media service that allows users to communicate with each other. There are millions of users and many companies use it as a marketing tool. The Twitter platform has been built using Ruby on Rails and JavaScript.
Twitter’s web application has been rewritten using React best practices. The mobile applications (iOS, Android) were also rewritten using React Native.
The new Twitter applications are faster than the previous version and they provide a better user experience.
Twitter is a great example of a company using React to build complex interfaces. The application itself is changing constantly, so having a framework like React that makes it easy to alter the components is crucial.
2-Paypal
PayPal is a true pioneer in payment processing online, having been the first service of its kind. They’re also one of the most trusted, with over 250 million users worldwide and a stellar reputation for security. PayPal’s logo has become synonymous with online shopping and transactions.
They use React to power their client-side app, which handles the checkout flow. Their engineers chose to use React because it provided them with a reliable way to create complex UIs from small and isolated pieces of code called components.
PayPal started using React as part of our Payment Hub application. This app is a large-scale single-page app that handles payments on the web for all international PayPal properties. The goal was to make it as easy as possible for PayPal developers to be able to create a new payment flow in their country or region by providing them with well-tested, reliable building blocks for payment flows.
3-Uber
Uber is a ridesharing service that connects drivers with riders who need transportation. Uber’s mobile app and website use React for their web interfaces. Uber also created its open-source project called react-vis, which is a charting library built using only React components.
Uber’s CTO Thuan Pham said: “We tried a few different things, and we ended up with React as our front-end stack. What we like about this is that you can break down your whole application into smaller components. We have been doing this on the server-side already so it was natural to do this on the client-side too”
This made it easy to scale and deploy new features in quick succession. Another advantage they got from using ReactJS was that they didn’t have to rewrite their whole app to implement new features, which obviously would have required more time and resources. The fact that there were developers who could easily switch between web apps and native apps also made it easier for the company to adopt ReactJS at a larger scale.
4-Cloudflare
Cloudflare’s analytics dashboard uses react for rendering as well as d3 for data visualization components. They also used the react-canvas component to render charts on an HTML5 canvas element at high frame rates. It even has a fallback to regular DOM if the canvas isn’t supported by the browser.
Cloudflare has been using React since 2013, first in an internal tool but soon after in the Cloudflare dashboard. The dashboard keeps getting larger and more complicated as Cloudflare adds new products, so it was important to have a framework that could scale with them. They also needed a framework that was easy for their large engineering teams with different experience levels to use.
React was a natural choice for Cloudflare because it allowed them to build reusable components and think about the data flow in their code. With React they could easily move between rendering on the client-side and server-side without changing much of their code, which was particularly useful when they wanted to start doing SEO while still allowing search engines to crawl their site.
On top of React, they created a lightweight wrapper called “Cloudflare-UI” that provided styling, layout, and components. Cloudflare-UI is open-source on GitHub and makes it easy for developers at Cloudflare to quickly build new features and create consistent interfaces across projects for both desktop and mobile devices.
5-Zendesk
When Zendesk Talk first came out in 2008, it was a hard-coded monolith. As the company scaled, it began using microservices to power its user-facing products. The client-side codebase was still a huge monolithic Rails App, which made testing, deployment, and maintenance difficult.
In 2014 they started experimenting with React to refactor a small portion of the UI and found that it dramatically improved development speed and stability. They decided to rewrite everything in React.
“We can ship new features every week now,” says Christopher Smith, Engineering Manager for Zendesk Voice. “We used to have one or two releases per quarter.”
Final Thoughts
React is a mature technology that provides a clear API for the web. It is fast and scalable, making it a great choice for companies trying to build fast interactive apps. With a diverse community of developers, it’s also an easy-to-learn technology–which is why many companies have picked React for their stack as well.
These companies have made smart business decisions by using React and gained many benefits from it. So, the brands listed above were the answer if you were looking for reasons why you should use React for your next project.
