Why Traditional Data Fetching Falls Apart
Understand the challenges of traditional data fetching methods such as manual DOM manipulation, tight coupling of data and UI logic, and lack of reactive updates. Discover how React simplifies these issues by using declarative rendering that automatically updates the UI based on component state, making applications more predictable and easier to maintain.
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Modern applications depend heavily on external data. Whether we’re loading product details, user profiles, or weather updates, our app constantly communicates with servers. In plain JavaScript, this usually means fetching data, creating HTML elements on the fly, and injecting them into the DOM. It sounds simple at first, but as soon as our UI grows or data changes frequently, this approach starts to crumble.
Before we explore how React streamlines the process, let’s revisit how data fetching is handled the old-fashioned way — and why it quickly turns into chaos.
How we traditionally fetch and render data
In traditional JavaScript, fetching and rendering data involves three separate concerns — getting the data, creating DOM elements, and manually updating the page. The following example shows this process in its rawest form. ...