People have different definitions for library and framework

One definition I know is:

• a framework is a software where you plug your code into
• a library is a software that you plug into your code

In terms of this definition, React is a framework.

But some people, especially in the front-end world, say a framework has to bring stuff like routers and/or widgets etc. pp.

So Angular, Ember.js and ExtJS are frameworks, but React isn't, because it only gives you the means to build components and render them into the DOM.

I see Angular and React as frameworks because you develop a Angular or React app, but when you use jQuery, you're just creating a web page that has some cool stuff.

I feel like React is very complex, specially when you include Redux and his friends. Don't know if this complexity comes from the mindset of a Angular dev, but when I first glanced React, it was very unfamiliar to me.

Of course React allows you to do things your way, but there's a structure to be followed in the end. In this topic, javascript allows you to do things the way you want, which is why there are so many libraries and frameworks.

It might look like that I dislike React, but the truth is I'm having lots of fun with it, and the learning process is steep but interesting.

I feel more productive with it, specially when it comes to creating components. Not having to declare every single component in app.module is a wonder.

The only thing I think is much more complicated, and it's probably due to my inexperience with React, is communicating with API (HTTP calls).

Because it does only 1 thing? Namely rendering components in HTML.

If it were a framework like Vue or Angular it would handle more problems like Routing, Animations and so on.

ll you got to do to use it is add the script in your HTML (or import however you like) and voila

React is available right away too, like jQuery, has global variables. But same as jQuery it does nothing if you do not call it.

Also search and read for articles named "Imperative vs Declarative jQuery", you will see why and how the paradigm shifted.

We use React very much like JQuery, simply bringing it in as a dependency. However, we use Webpack to facilitate React development by sprinkling some JSX in the mix. Without Webpack, we'd have to write all of our elements in a very cumbersome API that is pure JS. Webpack also let's us optimize tons of other things in the background such as cross-browser compatibility (for the most part). So, I think this whole magical setup of a React project with Webpack using create-react-app is what gives us the false impression that React is a full-blown framework. However, when we compare what React provides us to Angular, we notice that React is just a component library when compared to Angular's routing, dependency injection, module management, etc. Also, Angular has some very opinionated ways of organizing the code base whereas React doesn't. When we use React, all of these additional features have to come from some other library, not Facebook (owner's of the React project).

Another way to look at the difference between a framework and a library is how opinionated it is about your application structure.

A framework will commonly request or mandate that you extend specific classes, or put files in specific locations within the project. In addition, a framework will very often start itself, and your code is somehow started at some unspecified point in the future.

In contrast, a library will rarely mandate where to put your files, though it might require extending certain classes. More likely though, a good library works on interfaces, or else you use it's classes but not create your own. In addition, a library knows it cannot start your application for you, so you usually have to manually initialize it yourself.

I personally have not used React and so cannot say which one sounds more accurate.

Well there's react as in npm install react but that's not the same thing as the react you see on SO or job boards "React developer wanted" or "How do you filter an array in react?"

I am of the opinion that react (the package) is, in fact, a library. However, React as a whole has become a large ecosystem which is almost indistinguishable from a framework. While it is possible to use react as a library, in practice, one actually adopts a large number of tools and libraries from the React ecosystem. How many applications are there really that just use react without any related tooling or libraries?

The very fact that the default way of using react involves the use of a specialized DSL that isn't valid Javascript (JSX) tells me that no, React is not just a humble library. Is it a framework, though? Technically, probably not. However, the end result doesn't feel that different.

It reminds me a bit of the relationship between Ruby and Rails. While yes, technically, you can use Ruby without Rails, how many people actually do?

In my opinion React is a library. It does one thing, it let you describe how one piece of the interface should look like.

The interesting thing is that people choose to use it as a framework, by reaching out to other packages in the react ecosystem. What ends up happening is that your code lives inside React.

Take a look at this examples
React as a framework
React as a library

That means that Facebook is bad in terminology :)

I think you confuse react with the whole ecosystem around it.

A framework covers the edges, whereas a library is a tool to fulfill certain tasks. React itself only handles one task: abstracted Web Components. It provides an internal state, lifecycles and external properties and with ReactDOM a renderer for a browser or similar environment - and nothing more.

This has a few advantages: it is smaller than a full-featured framework, is less opinionated on how to solve problems and therefore allows for more choice. Don't like react-router? Use another one - or no router at all, if you don't need any. Need a complex state management? Try redux. Need to handle side-effects? you can choose between redux-thunks, redux-sagas and redux-observables. Unit testing can be done with enzyme, jest or mocha, sinon, chai, jasmine, karma, etc. There's no one or best way to do it, so you can do whatever works best for you.

I think we've heard all the arguments by now. Let me ask a question instead: does it really matter if React is a library or a framework? What are the consequences?

It's definitely NOT a framework. Something like "Create React App" or "Meteor" are frameworks that use React, but React on it's own does not run, it doesn't really do anything by itself. It needs Webpack or Rollup and all kinds of other tooling just to get up and running. React is a view library, that has an approach, but that's it. Frameworks are complete puzzles, React is just a piece of the puzzle.

For me, Angular is a framework - it's highly opiniated makes implicit assumption about your code and when there's a problem, you get a cryptic error message such as

'Unexpected value 'undefined' declared by the module 'DynamicTestModule' with a stack trace as high as a building entirely located inside Angular itself.

React is a library because you plug it into the part of your code you want, it is checking its input correctly and is focusing on doing one thing and doing it good instead of trying to do everything the bad way.

The litmus test:

• If your code calls it, it's a library.
• If it calls your code, it's a framework.

Looking at the React tutorial Starter Code ReactDOM.render() is the only part of React that your code calls. The rest, i.e. the majority of your code, is called by React.

Ipso facto - React is a framework because it is in control when most of your code runs.

For the expanded argument see: React is a (view component) framework

The correct definition that provides the difference between the library and the framework and the only one that makes sense :

"Your code calls library whereas framework calls your code."

Only this definition existed before unscrupulous React promoters started to promote it as a library.

React is obviously the framework. Very complex and opinionated one.