React

React is a free tool from Meta, the company behind Facebook, for building the screens you see in a browser. The idea behind it is small, and it still changed how most websites are made. Before React, someone had to write a separate instruction for every change on the screen. Find this label, change this number, hide that row, one at a time.

React turns that around, because you describe how the screen should look with the data you have now. It then compares your description with what is showing and makes only the changes that are needed. So you stop thinking in steps and start thinking about the result.

A screen is built from small pieces called components, and each one knows how to draw itself. A search box is one piece, a product card is another, and a basket is a piece made of smaller pieces. That is why the same product card can sit on the home page, in search results and inside an order without being written three times. The saving is real, which is why most new web work of the past ten years is built this way.

Here is the part people are rarely told: React is a library, not a full kit. It draws screens and stops there, so it does not decide how pages link together or how a form is checked. It does not decide how data arrives from the server either, so every team picks those parts itself. That means two projects that both use React can share almost no code. So the sentence “our developers know React” says less than it sounds, and the useful move is to ask which other tools they use. Linkysoft asks exactly that before quoting on a project it inherits, because the answer decides how much old work survives.

There is a cost as well, because the browser downloads the app and runs it before anything appears. On a cheap phone with a weak signal that is a real wait, and search engines saw empty pages for years. That is the problem Next.js was built to solve. The second surprise is React Native, which shares the ideas and much of the knowledge but not the screens. A React website therefore does not turn into a phone app for free, and we say that plainly at the start. The saving people expect sits in the team, not the code, so the question comes up early when Linkysoft scopes a web application.