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Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

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Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#72

Why is this on the top of HN ? Honestly, this is a bad thing, not a thing to show off. To quote the author: "We're web developers, not iOS developers." EXACTLY, don't bring your web tech into native platforms, learn to do it the right way or just hire someone who knows how to do it. Seeing things like that creeping into becoming a norm makes me cringe

:)

I got flamed for my rant.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#73

Why is this on the top of HN ? Honestly, this is a bad thing, not a thing to show off. To quote the author: "We're web developers, not iOS developers." EXACTLY, don't bring your web tech into native platforms, learn to do it the right way or just hire someone who knows how to do it. Seeing things like that creeping into becoming a norm makes me cringe

> learn to do it the right way

What is the right way? Native only?

There are many apps in the appstore that uses html5 and users of the app don't care how is it build.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#74

I'm writing mobile apps using angular / Cordova and ionic. When they are running on a device I can't tell the difference between a native app and a JS Cordova one. I think JS is the future of mobile apps.

I can tell you from experience that making a robust Ionic 1 app with Cordova that is performant is difficult. Cordova is not good at all.

We did not have chump change for developers either - I've numerous contributions to Angular and Ionic, and one of my former co-workers when I was there is now on the Angular team.

React Native is a superior abstraction, since it allows you to hook directly into native components very easily (try writing custom Cordova plugins), and keeps high level logic in JS.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#75
React Native is pretty awesome - especially if you've got a web version of your app. At work, we use React Native for our iOS application - and are able to share pretty much all the store & action creators logic for our web (and desktop) app. It's been pretty huge as all our iOS engineer (we only have one!) really has to do is do the view specific stuff for iOS, the rest being shared with the web/desktop version. Also, our engineers that work on the web application can contribute to the iOS app with ease too.

Our general product iteration strategy involves building it on the web version and then porting it to iOS fairly quickly. For a chat application, our stores handle a lot of data, so it's been awesome to have that code shared.

React Native's bridge is also alright. We bridge with Component Kit for the chat messages view & WebRTC for the voice side of things fairly easy from JS.

Also, being able to update the bundle w/o doing an App Store update is pretty big too.

Here's the app if anyone wants to try it: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/discord-chat-for-gamers/id98...

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#76

this is great and timely! I was planning to do my first proof of concept in RN this weekend in hopes to maybe use it in a hackathon next weekend. If anyone has any other beginner resources that would be great, I've yet to even use XCode :/

"I've yet to even use Xcode"

Boy are you in for a treat!

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i agree with you, although i think you are forgetting to add (and maybe it is implied here and i missed it) that learning mobile development requires you to not only learn new language APIs in objC/swift, but you also have to learn some new design patterns (delegation, etc.) and most importantly the SDKs (CocoaTouch) if you can use react native and avoid learning a lot of this it is a big win - I havnt used it yet, a…

Isn't delegation just a slight variation on callbacks?

Basically yeah. An object can have one delegate object, which implements a set of required and optional methods defined in a protocol. So the delegate can add customized behavior to an object without subclassing.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#79
post #29

Truthfully, the language barriers are nothing next to the API barriers dealing with your platform of choice. I am probably giving away my age here, but there's very little that's new under the sun after you've tussled with... say one each of the big three language families. These being: Nasty old C (not going anywhere, ever. Deal with it.), modern scripting languages (Ruby, Python, et al) and the real deal functional…

Where does C# fall among these 3 families?

The C category.

A 4th category is probably needed for statically compiled, garbage collected, OOP languages.

The reality is, most/all of the most popular languages blur the lines.

Javascript is getting official support for OOP as well as better support for functional programming.

C# has good support for dynamic typing as well as many functional characteristics.

High performance Python has always had the ability to delegate to C extensions.

Etc

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#80
post #29

Truthfully, the language barriers are nothing next to the API barriers dealing with your platform of choice. I am probably giving away my age here, but there's very little that's new under the sun after you've tussled with... say one each of the big three language families. These being: Nasty old C (not going anywhere, ever. Deal with it.), modern scripting languages (Ruby, Python, et al) and the real deal functional…

Where does C# fall among these 3 families?

I feel like C# (and C++, and Java) would all be basically in the C camp. C# and Java could be arguably somewhere on a spectrum between C and the scripty stuff.
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