Do you know react native?
Well, if you do know, you can skip this paragraph :D.
React is a very popular JavaScript library from Facebook for building declarative, efficient and flexible user interfaces. You can find more information about react here.
Most of current cross platform app development frameworks like Apache Cordova, Ionic under the hood displays web components on the top of webview which seems like native. But, they are rendering the components on the top of webview makes degrade its responsiveness.
About this blog
This blog aims to provide an overview on how to start with development of React Native application with JavaScript and its pros and cons over native development.
Prerequisite
Knowledge of JavaScript is required. The Mobile Development experience will be added advantage.
React native is really native, how?
React native uses native building blocks for the related platform (iOS/iPhone and Android) unlike other frameworks, cross platform app development libraries available in the market. You just put those building blocks together using JavaScript and React.
Although we are writing in JavaScript, but rendering of the react components are done as native platform widgets.If you have ever written you app using Java or Swift/Objective C , you will easily identify many react’s components.
For example,
{/* Login Button */}
<TouchableOpacity
style={styles.button_main}
onPress={this._validateInput.bind(this)}>
<Text style={{
textAlign: "center",
fontWeight: "bold",
fontSize: 16,
justifyContent: 'center'
}}>Login</Text>
</TouchableOpacity>
In the above example, you can easily Identify the snippet is for Button which refers to UIButton for iOS development and Button for Android app development.
How to get started with React Native?
Anyone with a knowledge of Javascript can easily dive into react-native app development. Since your most of the codebase is in the Javascript, you code for both Android and iOS/iPhone at the same time.
Person with native app development can have little grasp for this amazing platform due to its syntax and new approach to program using state and props. But with prior knowledge to React.js will feel it easy to understand.
Facebook has provided wonderful documentation on installing the react native dependencies for your related platform.
Why to use React Native?
1. React Native uses JavaScript – fast and popular programming language
JavaScript is a popular language driving the web, hence it's very unlikely to give it a try. It is fast and reliable which has emerged over time. So, react native has the advantage of using JavaScript for iOS/iPhone and Android app development with react native.
2. Maximum Code reusability
In React Native, you can use the same code for iOS as well as Android. It impacts hugely in development cost and time requirement. As per the recent statistics, 90% your codebase can be reused, isn’t that amazing??
3. Live reloading / Hot Loading
Generally, while developing your application with Xcode and Android Studio involves lots of recompilation of the code every time there is changes in the source code.But in React Native you can eliminate the recompilation process for every change and speed up your development by reloading your app easily. Thanks to Live reloading
In addition to this Hot Reloading has been introduced, which aims at providing following features:
-
Reducing the development time by allowing the user to see changes as soon as there are changes in the code as we see while web development. Though there are some cases when it takes to recompile the whole project, but most of the time will not require recompiling whole project every time app have changed. Cheers…
-
Using the JavaScript as the language, which does not have a long compilation cycle.
-
Implement a tool called Packager that transforms es6/flow/jsx files into normal JavaScript that the VM can understand. It was designed as a server that keeps intermediate state in memory to enable faster incremental changes and uses multiple cores.
4. Great community support
There is a very huge community support behind React Native and many third-party plugins and frameworks available which you can utilize to make your app stand out.
Facebook, Instagram and many companies have developed apps with React Native making it reliable to use.
5. Stability
From the time React Native is being launched, it has been under constant development cycle, including more and more features and UI components and stable builds.
Many of the apps from Facebook are built with React Native and also Production making it stable to use.
Keep yourself updated on React Native Development with blogs from Surekha technologies.
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