React

Three strengths

• Reusable pieces. A screen is put together from small parts, such as a button or a form. Each part is built once and used everywhere. 1
• Quick to update. When your data changes, React works out the smallest change needed on screen and makes only that. 3
• An industry standard. About 45 in every 100 developers surveyed in 2025 said they use React, so people who know it are easy to find. 2

What it is

When you use a website or app, React is often what draws the screen in front of you. It's a free, open source toolkit (anyone can use it and read its code) for building the parts of an app that people see and click: menus, forms, tables and buttons. 1

React began at Facebook. Software engineer Jordan Walke built an early version called FBolt in 2011, and it grew into React. Facebook shared it publicly in 2013 at a developer conference called JSConf US. 4 By mid-2013, Instagram's website was running on it too. 3

The big idea is the component: a piece of the screen with its own look and behaviour, as small as a button or as large as a whole page. 1 Because the pieces are reusable, a team can change a button once and watch every screen that uses it update. That's what keeps a growing app consistent instead of patchy, and it's why adding a feature later costs less than rebuilding a screen from scratch.

Today React sits behind customer portals, dashboards, online stores and internal tools, and we choose it for the screens of our web apps for the same reasons teams everywhere do. We get parts we can reuse, screens that update quickly, and a large pool of people who already know it.

How we use it

React is what we build the screens of your web app with, whether that's a customer-facing platform, a tool for your staff, an enterprise system or an MVP (a minimum viable product that proves an idea works before you spend big on it). We usually pair it with Next.js, which builds and publishes the pages, TypeScript, which catches mistakes early, and Chakra UI, which keeps buttons and forms consistent, and we add WebSockets for live features such as dashboards and notifications.

That's Software Development at work. Because we build each screen from reusable parts, new features reach you sooner and the app keeps growing with your business, and when the same idea needs to run on iPhone and Android, we reach for React Native.

We use AI-assisted tools to draft and prototype screens quickly. Once the design is settled, we review every line and test it before we ship it to you.

References

1. React team, "Quick Start", react.dev. https://react.dev/learn (accessed 28 October 2026)
2. Stack Overflow, "2025 Developer Survey: Technology", survey.stackoverflow.co, 2025. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology (accessed 28 October 2026)
3. Pete Hunt, "Why did we build React?", React Blog, 5 June 2013. https://legacy.reactjs.org/blog/2013/06/05/why-react.html (accessed 28 October 2026)
4. Gergely Orosz, "Behind the Scenes with React.js: the Documentary", The Pragmatic Engineer, 16 February 2023. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/react-documentary (accessed 28 October 2026)