React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces out of individual components, and it is designed to let you seamlessly combine components.

For instance, a navigation bar of a website is a standalone component, and then the hero’s section of a web page could also be a standalone component. These two components can be combined to make a web-page.

React is used to develop single page applications, and react is majorly concerned with the user interface and rendering of components to the virtual DOM. The advantage of react is that it only renders once, and only re-renders only those parts of the page that need be changed. This makes the website fast, user-friendly, and easily maintainable.

If we go history, React was initially released in May of 2013 and was authored by a guy called; Jordan Walke. Since then React has gained a lot of popularity and has a big community that supports and maintains it in partnership with META.

Written in Javascript, react was developed to be used on facebook social media platform and later adopted by instagram too.