React has been growing like weed! What could be the reason according to you?
I agree with Jeff. Angular 2 is takes a part on React.js popularity. If Angular 2 is not rewritten from scratch but it is easy to migrate from Angular 1.x to 2 maybe React.js will not become very popular as it is now.
It was created by Facebook. And we're all sheep in a gigantic herd. (No seriously. That's a big part of why it's caught on)
One thing is important. In rich web applications, it's really really tedious to handle a lot of DOM updates. Starting from Angular the framework is making updating easy, and React makes it even simple to use.
Also React fits the FRP(Functional Reactive Programming) paradigm very well. It got quite some agreements and improvements from the community.
The AngularJS team is. Angular was quickly becoming the de facto standard for building web apps (right or wrong) but then they came out with Angular2 which was a complete rewrite with no upgrade path (at the time of the announcement at least). The reaction from the development community was swift and angry. Why would anyone write an Angular 1.x app that was going to be deprecated in less than a year? Writing anything serious in the 2.x codebase was a no go since it was still in the alpha stages. Everyone started looking around for something new. Enter React. The learning curve was way smaller than Angular 1.x and it whomps the competition in terms of performance and scalability.
Now don't get me wrong, I love me some Angular and think the 2.0 is a massive improvement. Its still in beta though so its not a good fit for most projects yet. I am just saying that I saw React explode in popularity right after that.
React presents clear Mental Model of what we are writing without worrying about the (Evil DOM) . Unlike other monolithic frameworks like ember, angular its just a thin library for the View layer. So it gave the developers freedom to use it with their current implementation easily. React's ability to adapt with current implementation might have caused this growth.
It has number of advantages when compared to any other view library, But I mainly think the brand behind it, FACEBOOK. It attracted the developer community. Apart from that component model, virtual dom, JSX(htmlish javascript), well-defined component lifecycle made it more popular.
Stephan de Vries
Full stack developer, enthusiastic about new technologies.
There are multiple reasons for React's massive popularity:
But I think the biggest reason behind the massive growth and popularity is that React has a different, refreshing approach to web development. Instead of blindly following traditional best practices, it's rethinking best practices. And that leads to better performance and a simpler programming model.