Mastering ReactJS: Understanding Hooks, Components, and Libraries
ReactJS Project Ideas for Beginners
What is ReactJS?
React JS, the open-source JavaScript library, is widely used for building dynamic user interfaces (UI) specifically for single-page applications.
- React is designed in a way such that it can be easily integrated with already existing code or any other libraries.
- Its primary motive is simplifying the process of developing and building web applications that are fast, scalable, and simple.
- React uses modular and cohesive components, which make them heavily reusable and that contribute to accelerating the development time.
Some Useful Points
- When we start developing simple applications with ReactJS, it will be a great idea to pay attention to Redux and React-Router as well.
- Redux is basically an open-source application state manager which helps the users to keep the application clean while they have to keep a lot of data.
- React-Router is a library used with React.js to create and manage routes in single-page applications.
- Before starting with this library, the users should be confident with their HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills.
- With ReactJS, we can also use **Bootstrap or any other CSS frameworks that we prefer.
- For REST API, we can use the JavaScript fetch method or external Axios library.
- For starting a new React.js project, we can always use create-react-app.
Project Topics
The following applications can be considered as some good project choices, especially for beginners trying to master the ReactJS library. These are mostly single-page applications and one can gain enough confidence after developing any of these applications.
1. Weather App
A Weather Application can be a perfect ReactJS project for beginners, where we can code it in a matter of a few hours. For this app, we can leverage fake, hard-coded data until we get all the features correct. While developing this weather app, we will learn how to connect to an external API and display the appropriate results. This practical skill will come in very handy when we develop other kinds of single-page applications that are designed to fetch data from external sources and display the outcomes.
In this, we have to build a weather app that can display a few day's weather forecast with all the basic functions, including **city name, current weather icon, temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. It must display the recording of high and low temperatures of each day, including images for sunny/ rainy/ cloudy/ snowy weather conditions.
It should have a responsive design and refresh every certain amount of time with exact temperature and weather conditions.
After getting key functionalities in place, we can expand the application in the following ways:
- Include the functionality where the user can click on a particular day of the week to see the hourly forecast.
- Add React Router to the application by using the command npm install react-router. For instance- routes that can display the ******forecast, along with the name-of-day and the hourly forecast for that day.
- We can sign up on the open weather map to obtain a free API key and to fetch a forecast, then we can also feed this data in our app.
- If we wish to make the app more attractive, we can add a graphics library like VX.
2. Messaging App
Instant messaging is part of our social lives as much it is a part of every business association or correspondence. Companies big or small use instant messaging to provide 24×7 customer support to their customers.
Messaging apps are hugely popular and a great option for ReactJS lovers to build their first ReactJS projects for beginners. Also, building a messaging app is one of the best ways to monetize our React skills. Real-time is the essence of instant messaging. The first thing to consider in mobile-based messaging apps is that we have to facilitate smooth conversation between 2 or more people in real-time.
We can always use tools like Firebase that transport data via WebSockets to display messages immediately in a conversation. React Native can be an ideal choice for this project.
3. Social Media App
The roaring success of Social media applications like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter is a great inspiration for budding programmers to try their hands on creating some useful ReactJS projects for beginners in the field of social media marketing. These apps possess a number of advanced features to facilitate a better service experience for the user. So, we can experiment with these features to get a better real-life project experience for ourselves.
After adding the basic features, we can create additional features for customization that will allow end-users to tweak their profiles and accounts according to their requirements and preferences.
Some of the most common features of almost all social media apps are:
- User authentication
- Notification and newsfeed
- Easy integration with other platforms
- Posting, sharing, and commenting
4. E-Commerce App
E-commerce apps like Amazon, Flipkart, Nykaa, etc. have become an integral part of our lives. Every business owner is coming up with their own apps to survive the tough competition. So, if we have hands-on experience with building functional e-commerce react apps, it will make us more saleable in the development industry.
We need to keep in mind that we are talking about developing a small e-commerce project that is focused more on a particular industry, we can choose any industry that interests us like- mobiles, TVs, laptops, etc. and develop our e-commerce app around that.
AN e-commerce app can ensure the delivery of products or services along with browsing products or services. Also, customers can enjoy seamless customer service. All-round customer support and good customer experience are two vital elements of any successful app, so make sure customers can enjoy seamless customer service with our ReactJS project.
As far as features of the e-commerce app are concerned-
- Keep the layout and interface neat and easy-to-navigate,
- Include the location option for deliveries, add a shopping cart, and a wishlist.
- Make sure the checkout process incorporates the necessary authentication options.
5. Productivity App
This is one of the easiest projects on the list with tremendous tutorials available to master the concepts and build our own ReactJS app.
As the name suggests, productivity apps help in enhancing productivity. Some of the most commonly used productivity apps are note-taking apps, team management apps, task list apps, time management apps, and more. With so many common productivity apps available and already built, we can try building an app with our own creativity that offers a detailed introduction to the app development process.
While developing these ReactJS projects for beginners, we must ask what features will simplify the daily schedule or learning schedule.
Start with a simple feature, like a text editor for writing formatted text with markdown, and gradually start expanding upon the elements like- the option to save the text as individual files on the computer, to export the text markdown as HTML for writing formatted emails.
6. Blog
The next useful idea we can add to our ReactJS projects would be a blogging application. For writing aspirant coders, this can be the stepping stone to our own blog one day.
We can start by creating the components to display the blog posts, one to display them as a grid and another to display the whole post with a title, image, and text.
Also, we can create a way to publish a new post, which means we need to create a form with title input, textarea, and image upload component*.* Later, we could add features like comments, voting, or editing the posts.
Summary
- In this article, we understood the ReactJS JavaScript library and its salient features.
- We also saw the various useful points to keep in mind when starting with ReactJS development.
- Projects play a vital role while learning any library or framework and in this article, we discussed various ReactJS project ideas for beginners.
- Weather App, Social Media App, Messaging App, Productivity App, Blogging App, and e-commerce App can be considered as some good topics for projects.