“Idea is great, but the app is very poor. UI is not at all user-friendly. I am deleting it right away.”
How disheartening it would be to see such a review on your app, which you made with blood and sweat. It is not a new discovery that a classy and user-friendly UI is necessary to complete your great idea into a successful app. Every developer knew this struggle until 2011, when Facebook first used React for its newsfeed. Or is there something else?
Before we dive deeper into styled-components, let us take a quick look at React.
What Is React?
React JS is an open-source JavaScript library built by Facebook. It is used to build elegant and responsive user interfaces/UI components. React is preferred by front-end developers as it works with components and efficiently renders with backend development libraries such as Java, Django, node.js, etc. Also, react renders any data changes without reloading the entire application code, which makes it faster, scalable, and more reliable.
As per a report by Statista, in 2022, React was the second most-used framework, with 42.62% of developers using it. Not just that, there are more than 10 million websites live with react as their development framework.
In react, your application can be developed by coding each part separately by treating them as a component. You can connect all these components together to make a sound UI. All of these components are reusable, which makes the UI designing part easier. A component is basically a JavaScript function that accepts an argument and passes a react element.
Now that we have gone through what React and components are, let’s understand styled-components and their pros and cons.
Styled Components
The styled component is a library built for React and React Native. It allows you to style your react components by writing actual CSS in it, giving developers the flexibility to use their CSS code on multiple projects. This also saves time and effort for the developers.
Styled Components utilizes tagged template literals to style react components, which removes the mapping between style and component. Meaning that when you are creating your styles, you are actually writing a normal react component, which has your styles attached to it.
Yes, the Styled components library is easy, flexible, and amazing, but just like everything else, it also has its pros and cons. What are they? Let’s see: