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React Native at Airbnb

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Re: React Native at Airbnb

#141

Post by LeoNatan25 »

RussianCow wrote: post #57
pjmlp wrote: post #10

Yet another company discovers what many of us did ages ago with multi-platform frameworks. Additional layers not supported by platform owners, mean extra debugging efforts tracking down which layer is responsible, catching up with native SDK features, need to be an expert at both layers, lack of integration with native debugging tools... But business always wants the Ferrari solution at the cost of a Fiat panda.

While I don't disagree with your premise, "need to be an expert at both layers" is absolutely still true if you build your app natively for each platform (more so, even). At least with a common platform, if nothing else, you can share quite a bit of code, and that alone might make it worth the extra layers.

And “developing” in RN requires you to be an expert in three fields: iOS, Android and the RN layer, which is often buggy. How is that better?

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#142

Post by LeoNatan25 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #89
k__ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the obsession with native navigation libaries. I built a bunch of apps with JS navs and nobody ever complained...

Did you test your app with VoiceOver, the iOS screen reader for blind people? The difference between non-native and native navigation is particularly noticeable in that case, unless perhaps you fire a UIAccessibilityScreenChangedNotification after navigating to a new screen. That's just the scenario I'm aware of. I haven't done any real projects with React Native, so there may be other pitfalls.

Of course not. They are a lazy developer that care little about the user experience.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#143

Post by xenadu02 »

I’ve never seen anyone do a battery impact analysis of React Native. I wonder why?

Person sally, I don’t want to use products where the developer prioritizes their problems over my experiencs but YMMV. Some will argue that an Electron dumpster fire is superior to nothing. I consider that debatable.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#144

Post by tannhaeuser »

I was looking forward to using RN but I guess I fell victim (again!) to whishful thinking and the "No silver bullett" fallacy. Come to think of it, why have we accepted React as the go-to approach to this degree? React doesn't even make an effort to isolate from HTML and DOM at the conceptual level, and I'd wager an opinionated framework about "panels", "fields", "field groups" and events is more representative of what folks typically want to do with React, rather than manipulating pseudo-markup using JSX however elegant and neutral.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#145

Post by BinaryIdiot »

benawad wrote: post #4

"Redux is notorious for its boilerplate and has a relatively difficult learning curve. We provided generators for some common templates but it was still one of the most challenging pieces and source of confusion while working with React Native." Interesting to see even Airbnb struggles with Redux

> Interesting to see even Airbnb struggles with Redux

I mean even the creator of Redux says you probably don't need to use it or if you do not all of it. It's overly complex for what it is meant to do, IMO. I had issues figuring it out initially and now if I don't touch it for a few months I feel like I have to re-learn how parts of it work because I forget and it doesn't feel intuitive to me.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#146

Post by MrRubbish »

rpeden wrote: post #70
kbyatnal wrote: post #16

"While debugging, React Native attaches to a Chrome Developer Tools instance. This is great because it is a powerful debugger. However, once the debugger is attached, all JavaScript runs within Chrome’s V8 engine. This is fine 99.9% of the time. However, in one instance, we got bit when toLocaleString worked on iOS and but only worked on Android while debugging. It turns out that the Android JSC doesn’t include it an…

I ran into a fun one like that many years ago in IE. The JavaScript I had written was failing, but when I opened up the devtools to debug it, it worked. It turned out that in that version of IE, the console object only existed when the devtools were open. So a stray console.log call was causing an exception because console was undefined. But when I opened the devtools to see what was going on, console existed and so…

I’ve never been bitten by this one.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#147

Post by rimliu »

xenadu02 wrote: post #143

I’ve never seen anyone do a battery impact analysis of React Native. I wonder why? Person sally, I don’t want to use products where the developer prioritizes their problems over my experiencs but YMMV. Some will argue that an Electron dumpster fire is superior to nothing. I consider that debatable.

I am still waiting for tide to turn and for times when users mattered to come back. Not sure if it ever will.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#148

Post by rimliu »

nickspag wrote: post #13
onedev wrote: post #3

Others have been coming out and talking about similar experiences with React Native. This thread made the rounds on Twitter and Medium fairly recently: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1002634185566236679 https://twitter.com/VivekxK/status/1002694526467653632

Coursera also removed it completely.

Source?

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#149

Post by tomduncalf »

danabramov wrote: post #33
eysquared wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. Doing so while working across organizations that may or may not use react-native is doubly so. Sometimes this boils down to the technology, knowledge, and the engineering systems needed to support both but I've also found native developers tend to strongly dislike react-native and lobby against whenever they can. For me, I'm using it to successfu…

>The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. We've experienced some of the difficulties in this area at Facebook as well. If you're curious, making native JS integration more seamless is a big motivation for the ongoing architectural revamp that we've recently posted about: http://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2018/06/14/state... It's a shame we weren't fast enough to help Airbnb in…

Interested to see what developments occur in this area, it’s a part of React Native I’m very familiar with as the product we are building has a native (C++) audio engine with a React Native GUI. Would be more than happy to discuss what we are doing, our experiences so far, and how we are planning to improve the integration on our end if it might be relevant to what the RN team are looking at.

That said, the experience we’ve had has largely been positive and I don’t think we could have achieved what we have so far given team size and time constraints without React Native. I suspect it gets more painful if you try to combine native and RN GUI elements - our UI is purely RN so there is a fairly clear separation of concerns.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#150

Post by exclusiv »

rpeden wrote: post #70
kbyatnal wrote: post #16

"While debugging, React Native attaches to a Chrome Developer Tools instance. This is great because it is a powerful debugger. However, once the debugger is attached, all JavaScript runs within Chrome’s V8 engine. This is fine 99.9% of the time. However, in one instance, we got bit when toLocaleString worked on iOS and but only worked on Android while debugging. It turns out that the Android JSC doesn’t include it an…

I ran into a fun one like that many years ago in IE. The JavaScript I had written was failing, but when I opened up the devtools to debug it, it worked. It turned out that in that version of IE, the console object only existed when the devtools were open. So a stray console.log call was causing an exception because console was undefined. But when I opened the devtools to see what was going on, console existed and so…

Yeah unless you wrap console log you just do this: window.console && console.log('debug msg');

In older Android versions, warnings in modern versions actually crash React Native apps. Can be very frustrating.

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