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React Native for Windows and Mac

microsoft.github.io

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Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#141

Post by NocturnalWaffle »

yodon wrote: post #71
yoloClin wrote: post #21

Is anyone able to provide a map of modern frameworks? With React-native, React-redux, Angular, Vue and probably a bunch of others. I'm really not sure what's relevant now and what was relevant 6 months ago. I'm genuinely curious, but it's pretty difficult to grasp and no framework homepage is going to tell you "Don't use me, I'm about to be a dead project!" and every developer will tell you their preferred framework…

"I can't figure out what will be relevant in six months" might have been a legitimate complaint a decade ago, but those days are long gone. React has been a core part of the front end ecosystem for almost 10 years. Angular is more than 10 years old. Vue is the "new kid" on the block at about six years old. React is roughly 10x more popular than Vue or Angular according to npm usage, has been far more popular in usage…

React, almost 10 years? It was only open sourced 7 years ago and definitely took time to fully catch on..

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#142

Post by scarface74 »

wyc wrote: post #17

React Native scares me with its dependency webs: http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react-native From my experience, it's really great to work with and definitely saves a ton of work, but the depgraph above fills me with doubt for use in sensitive applications such as in finance or healthcare. For this reason, I've been trying out Flutter or even considering to go back to native apps. Perhaps there's some kind of middle…

For this reason, I've been trying out Flutter or even considering to go back to native apps.

This says so much about the sad state of modern software development...

When native development is a last resort.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#143

Post by crazypython »

_bxg1 wrote: post #92
satvikpendem wrote: post #69

I tried using this a few months ago, as well as React Native for mobile and React Native Web for web, and I felt like they were all just hacks glued together to get cross-platform support, and RN isn't even native, it still includes a Javascript bridge. Build dependencies and packages were a nightmare, things continuously broke. I tried Flutter afterwards and it just felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything "just…

> RN isn't even native, it still includes a Javascript bridge "Native" doesn't describe the programming language, but the GUI layer. Native == non-web-browser.

React Native isn't afraid to expose platform specific details when abstracting away cross platform APIs in uniform APIs. In my experience, it was fairly easy to use a native UI library inside a React Native app. (It takes more work to embed a React Native view inside a native view that's embedded in a react native view, but it's possible.)

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#144

Post by freefriedrice »

43920 wrote: post #22
kevmo314 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron can't do multiple windows or consistent rendering? Legit question, I just started using Electron, hadn't heard of the former and thought the latter was a selling point because all platforms wrapped Electron's Chrome.

Electron supports multiple windows, but it ends up being annoying to do because each window runs in its own process. If your app has any kind of central state that's shared between windows, you end up copying data between processes frequently, which can be slow. Rendering consistency is generally pretty good; I haven't run into any issues with that.

This bugs me to no end about Electron. The one module that existed to implement cross window / process communication is deprecated with no alternative. I haven't found a solution for multithreading in electron without killing the base process (which they explicitly say NOT to do compute in) or the rendering process (duh).

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#145

Post by diegof79 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #69

I tried using this a few months ago, as well as React Native for mobile and React Native Web for web, and I felt like they were all just hacks glued together to get cross-platform support, and RN isn't even native, it still includes a Javascript bridge. Build dependencies and packages were a nightmare, things continuously broke. I tried Flutter afterwards and it just felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything "just…

I had the same experience.

Expo is wonderful for prototyping and quick iteration. The ability to use Snacks online and see them working on the phone is great.

But beyond that everything in RN feels hacky and unfinished. While working with it I had some silly issues with Metro, and found some subtle bugs in Text and Button components.

About the "Native" part. I think that a lot of people have the expectation that doing RN apps will be the same as building a iOS or Android native app. But RN+Expo is not that different from frameworks like Ionic. Is really hard to do an app that follows the Apple HIG or Material Guidelines, you end with something in the middle that doesn't look or feels truly native (at least not without tons of extra work to imitate things that you get for free in the native UI kit) .

RN without Expo is not so nice, lots of rough edges and sooner or later you'll need to write interop code in Objective-C or Android Java to take advantage of the native platform.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#146

Post by swsieber »

tptacek wrote: post #88
wyc wrote: post #17

React Native scares me with its dependency webs: http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react-native From my experience, it's really great to work with and definitely saves a ton of work, but the depgraph above fills me with doubt for use in sensitive applications such as in finance or healthcare. For this reason, I've been trying out Flutter or even considering to go back to native apps. Perhaps there's some kind of middle…

Any large financial services company you're working with is already deploying sensitive apps on Node, for what it's worth.

That's not very comforting. Banks deploy nonsensical stuff all the time (like bad password policies).

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#147

Post by crazypython »

qppo wrote: post #6

I'd love to abandon my C/C++ UI frameworks for React, but I need - consistent rendering/support across multiple platforms and versions - multiple windows - rendering to a window that isn't owned by the UI being rendered or created by the framework Can I do that all in React native? Edit: don't need to bring up electron.

> - rendering to a window that isn't owned by the UI being rendered or created by the framework

I once used a native library I installed with iOS' native package manager, Cocoapods. I rendered a React Native view inside the native view, which was contained inside a react native view. The only limitation is that the two react native views used separate bundlers i.e. the two react native views can only communicate through the native platform, they couldn't communicate to each other via JavaScript.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#148

Post by crazypython »

yesimahuman wrote: post #135
tphan wrote: post #114

I've used React Native for a client and, whilst it was super clunky, I still enjoyed being able to write React to deploy to mobile. With React Native for Web, you can technical write code that writes to a bunch of different platforms, a big selling point for businesses.

Check out Ionic which now fully supports React and will give you a similar benefit but without the need to use RNW or have different code for each platform. Also Ionic’s components are much more robust and widely used than RNW.

I agree that Ionic's components are easier to work with and less of a hassle. However, React Native components let you talk directly to native, even using native components from the native platform's ecosystem in your code. It's a tradeoff developers have to make.

https://github.com/wix/react-native-navigation is beautiful, it uses iOS' own navigation APIs, but it's a pain.

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#149

Post by freefriedrice »

qppo wrote: post #6

I'd love to abandon my C/C++ UI frameworks for React, but I need - consistent rendering/support across multiple platforms and versions - multiple windows - rendering to a window that isn't owned by the UI being rendered or created by the framework Can I do that all in React native? Edit: don't need to bring up electron.

Java?

STMicroelectronics uses it for almost all of their applications, which ship in one zip file with binaries for Win/Mac/Linux.

It ticks #1 and #2, but I don't know about #3.

Of course, I'm not sure if having web-like programming is your implicit #4?

Re: React Native for Windows and Mac

#150

Post by preommr »

yodon wrote: post #71
yoloClin wrote: post #21

Is anyone able to provide a map of modern frameworks? With React-native, React-redux, Angular, Vue and probably a bunch of others. I'm really not sure what's relevant now and what was relevant 6 months ago. I'm genuinely curious, but it's pretty difficult to grasp and no framework homepage is going to tell you "Don't use me, I'm about to be a dead project!" and every developer will tell you their preferred framework…

"I can't figure out what will be relevant in six months" might have been a legitimate complaint a decade ago, but those days are long gone. React has been a core part of the front end ecosystem for almost 10 years. Angular is more than 10 years old. Vue is the "new kid" on the block at about six years old. React is roughly 10x more popular than Vue or Angular according to npm usage, has been far more popular in usage…

Oh, c'mon, that's a bit of a stretch.

I was around in 2014, when angular 1 was starting to be a big thing.

If you look at reactjs on google trends, react gets its first bump in 2014-15, and then another one around 2017.

VueJs gets a huge jump in 2016-2017.

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Java has been around for decades, has had much fewer changes, and is entrenched in a lot of code. In comparison, react has gone through some big changes in a very short amount of time, and most people use it to build SPAs that aren't usually mission critical.

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