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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

#101

Post by darylteo »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #87
EvanPlaice wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

I've been out of the ecosystem for a while but isn't it closer to type inference than dynamic typing?

C# has both. "var" for type inference, "dynamic" for dynamic typing.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#103

Post by wvenable »

erikbigelow wrote: post #100
wvenable wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my mobile I absolutely use and prefer native applications. I only use my mobile web browser for web browsing tasks. On my desktop, I only use my web browser for web browsing (searches, news, content, etc) and I hardly use any web applications. I don't feel like I'm unique in this. I think this "synthesis of both approaches" has merits.

I'm the opposite of you. I'd much prefer to do everything in a browser. I hate downloading new apps for every little link. I was really hoping the Firefox OS worked out.

I don't even have a lot of apps, though. And using an web application is just as much work: logging in, bookmarking, etc.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#104

Post by dj_doh »

The biggest barrier to high fidelity ECMAScript apps on native platform is simple economics. Apple is guaranteed a $99 bounty when you push something on the appstore. Making Safari or WebView compatible with their native APIs and performance is a risk for AppStore.

Having built 3 non-trivial iOS apps using phonegap and JavaScript. I have come to the conclusion that I'm never going to build native apps using web stack. I have struggled with API support, DOM limitations and performance.

Disclaimer: I have not tried react native.

I think it'll fail for mission critical and non-trivial apps. If you just want an AppStore presence for your browser app or your app is trivial like one in the post. You are probably going to be fine.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#105

Post by SonicSoul »

uptown wrote: post #76
SonicSoul wrote: post #19

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!

sarcasm?

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#106

Post by danappelxx »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #86
coldtea wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.) Delegation has been a standard feature of desktop APIs for decades. Not just on things like Smalltalk and ObjC -- it has been the standard .NET model for UI events since C# 1.0.

sure but the majority of developers writing code write webapps. Some there are some desktop apps out there but not a lot.

Going to need a source on that 'majority' of which you speak of as if its a fact. Sure, web development is popular, but there are a _lot_ of developers working on other things (which potentially include delegation). Also, I'm sure you'll many web frameworks that use the delegation pattern.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#107

Post by aaviran »

jhgg wrote: post #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. Als…

Just wanted to say Discord is awesome!

I didn't play on-line for years, last time I did regularly, the standard for voice communication was Ventrilo/Teamspeak. When I first used Discord a couple of months ago, I was just shocked. It has a decent webapp. I can create my own server for free. It takes less than a minute to get going. It just works.

Truly amazing work, keep up

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#108

Post by cellularmitosis »

SonicSoul wrote: post #105
uptown wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've yet to even use Xcode" Boy are you in for a treat!

sarcasm?

Yes. Since the release of Swift, Xcode has Ben notoriously crash-prone and buggy. It is getting better slowly, but that was a pretty terrible first six months.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#109

Post by EvanPlaice »

marknutter wrote: post #89
EvanPlaice wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React Native doesn't use embedded webviews and provides an escape hatch to write native code when Reactive Native's capabilities fall short.

That's no different than appcellerator or xamarin though. And in the case where you are just using embedded webviews you can easily write native code alongside them. Cordova is written in objective-c and is easy to understand.

You're right, I was thinking of platforms more like Cordova.

I did a little reading and it appears that React Native, Appcelerator, and Xamarin are pretty close to feature parity.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#110

Post by EvanPlaice »

alexashka wrote: post #90
EvanPlaice wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two fundamental issues with the mobile first approach. Duplicate effort does incur a real cost in terms of time to delivery. Duplication is a clear sign of inefficiency. A platform that provides native support for multiple platforms reduces such duplication. The maintainance cost of providing multiple platform-specific implementations compounds over time. For every feature added there's a chance that subtle…

I understand the theoretical upsides to one platform/language to rule them all, absolutely. I am saying that trying to re-write the layout engine, data layer and all the rest to make it work the same on both platforms is not only a massive undertaking - it is ignoring the reason the platforms diverge to begin with. iOS has features Android doesn't and vice versa. Something that works on both platforms is always going…

The application layer is decoupled from the rendering layer specifically for reuse across multiple platforms. That means the data layer that handles data fetching and change propagation works everywhere.

The view rendering layer is the part that is specific to each platform and the React community provides web components that work natively on each platform making the development process between mobile/web more consistent. Mobile provides an escape hatch to write platform specific code in the native language.

"As for web/ios/android/desktop - this is a rare bird"

Targeting all, will remain very unlikely. Targeting more than one is pretty common. React and Angular2 are pushing hard to enter the mobile development ecosystem. Microsoft has been pushing for Typescript usage on the desktop and just picked up Xamarin so we'll likely see desktop or web or mobile hybrid applications at some point in the future.

If the barrier-of-entry to support another platform is low enough, it'll make sense to do so. In the current ecosystem, supporting even 2 platforms is a massive undertaking.

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