What Is a React Component?

A React component is an essential building block of any React application. It is an independent and reusable piece of code containing logic and UI elements.

The components deliver efficiency and scalability by enabling developers to compose, combine and customize them as needed. For example, you can work on components independently and then merge them all into a parent component, representing your final UI.

There are two major types of React components:

• Functional components – just like JavaScript functions, they accept properties (props) as arguments and return a React element. The function components are easier to understand and can be written using much less code compared to the class components, making them a preferred choice for presenting UI elements.
• Class components – a bit more complex than the functional components, these are used to show inheritance and access data of other components. They can have and manage their own state and lifecycle methods, making them suitable for more complicated scenarios, such as a building a React Data Grid, for example.

Rendering Components

The React components can be easily reused throughout the application. Once you have created a certain component, you can use it in different places in your application without having to write the same code each and every time. Each component represents a single building block, but when combined, they can make up a whole application.

Component Re-Rendering

The “re-rendering” concept enables the update of a component’s view when the state or props have changed. When these are updated, React re-renders the specific components and its child components to reflect the changes in the view.