Solved: react-dom

React-DOM is an essential part of the React ecosystem, as it’s the glue that connects React’s descriptive components to the actual DOM in a web browser or other platform such as React Native. We will deep dive into understanding React-DOM better and how it helps to facilitate the smooth functioning of a React application.

The React-DOM library provides DOM-specific methods that can be used at the top level of a React application to enable an efficient way of managing updates to the DOM. This boosts the application’s agility and response time, making it more user-friendly.

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';

function App() {
  return (
    <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
  );
}

ReactDOM.render(
  <App />,
  document.getElementById('root')
);

The above snippet of code shows a Hello World application using React-DOM, where the ReactDOM.render method takes two arguments – the react element to update the DOM with and the container to update.

React-DOM Methods

React-DOM primarily provides two methods; render and unmountComponentAtNode.

• ReactDOM.render(): This is the most commonly used method provided by the React-DOM library. It renders a React element into the provided DOM node in the browser and returns a reference to the rendered component or returns null for stateless components.

ReactDOM.render(element, container[, callback])

• ReactDOM.unmountComponentAtNode(): This method removes a mounted React component from the DOM and cleans up its event handlers and state.

ReactDOM.unmountComponentAtNode(container)

Virtual DOM in React

One of the key ideas behind React is the usage of Virtual DOM. It’s basically a lightweight copy of the actual DOM kept in memory. React-DOM is the library that compares the current Virtual DOM with the next version and generates a list of changes to be applied in the actual DOM, a process known as “diffing”. After performing diffing, React batches these changes and applies them to the actual DOM for better performance, a process known as “reconciliation.”

Understanding and working effectively with React-DOM requires familiarity with the overall architecture of React. To truly leverage the power of React, developers need to recognize the pivotal role played by React-DOM in connecting the React paradigm with an effective web presentation. In essence, the core of React may lie in components and one-way data flow, but the real magic happens thanks to the React-DOM library.