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Introducing React Native [video]

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Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#91

Post by jordwalke »

thewarrior wrote: post #86
jordwalke wrote: post #83

I'm Jordan and I'm on the React (and React Native) team. There's been some great questions and insight on this thread. React Native offers a ton of benefits around productivity (and ability to use React of course), but since there are many questions about performance, I thought I'd share some of my own personal perspective on the matter. React Native is very different than other approaches because: 1. We're not promi…

Do you guys have a set of cross platform components like , , that will work across Android , iOS and Web ? The native components might behave slightly different on each platform so I was wondering if you guys have subclassed the native components to behave similarly on all platforms.

We have a and that works on iOS and Android. We also had web implementations working as a proof of concept but I'm curious if the community would be more interested in helping us implement/maintain the web implementations since we want to focus more on the integrations with each native platform for now.

You're probably aware, but it's always good to keep in mind that we don't have a goal to allow people to "write your app once, run anywhere". You should be able to share as much code as you want to share, but the truth is that great mobile experiences design not only for the platform, but even for the device. We should build apps that take advantage of the extra screen real estate on an iPhone6+, for example. So even within a single platform, you'll want to design specific experiences, and the same goes for implementations across different platforms.

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#95

Post by cromwellian »

We just demoed something similar at the GWTCreate conference, an Angular-like library called Singular (http://daniel-kurka.de/talks/gwtcreate15/singular.pdf)

It differs in that it uses the same techniques as Google Inbox to run native code. We cross compile to Objective-C with j2objc, and cross-compile to JS via GWT, the data binding, controllers, are shared code on all platforms that run full speed native, while the UI templating language on each platform is platform native (e.g. angular directives directly in Android XML files)

It produces completely platform-impedance matched apps on each platform (e.g. native on mobile, JS on Web) while allowing the continued use of the regular UI design toolchains people are used to (Android Studio/Xcode Interface Builder)

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#96

Post by thewarrior »

jordwalke wrote: post #91
thewarrior wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you guys have a set of cross platform components like , , that will work across Android , iOS and Web ? The native components might behave slightly different on each platform so I was wondering if you guys have subclassed the native components to behave similarly on all platforms.

We have a and that works on iOS and Android. We also had web implementations working as a proof of concept but I'm curious if the community would be more interested in helping us implement/maintain the web implementations since we want to focus more on the integrations with each native platform for now. You're probably aware, but it's always good to keep in mind that we don't have a goal to allow people to "write you…

That's interesting. I guess I can't really understand it until I see it finally released. A set of basic widgets like Lists,Sliders and Switches should definitely cover most use cases.

How are react native apps architected ? Is it something like a model that is written in pure JS that is common for all platforms ?

So after I've created the model in JS , would I have to tailor the render() method for each platform ?

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#97

Post by CmonDev »

marknutter wrote: post #40
bobajeff wrote: post #32

I wish they'd go into more detail on why they can't make an app like paper in the browser environment. They mentioned something about Web Workers being crippled and later on explained how their framework puts JavaScript in it's own thread by default. I'm also wondering why in their experience no one ever comes close to native widgets when imitating them in a Web apps.

There's quite a bit of hyperbole in this talk. Some web apps do in fact come close to native, but to the trained eye of a Facebook software engineer it will feel miles behind. Your average Joe doesn't give a shit, as long as they can use the app. If they did, Facebook's Paper wouldn't have been such a flop.

Don't underestimate the users. They might use different words, but their comments and ratings will tell the story of web/hybrid suffering. Unfortunately web is not meant for apps, but for interactive documents.

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#98

Post by CmonDev »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #29
evv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Eric, from the React Native team. We're starting with iOS and Android, which will keep us busy for the foreseeable future. That said, we will open source soon, and we'd be happy to accept help targeting other platforms!

Very interesting. Microsoft allows you to build fully native (not webview wrappers) apps using WinJS, and they have shown that React (along with Angular) can be used to build those apps [1]. I wonder if Microsoft will put resources into bridging the gap between React Native and Windows 10. As a long time web oriented .NET developer wanting to pick up mobile who has been wondering whether to go Cordova or dive in full…

Honest question: you don't mind switching from a modern well-designed static language to legacy hastily-designed dynamic language?

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#99

Post by jordwalke »

tinganho wrote: post #89
jordwalke wrote: post #83

I'm Jordan and I'm on the React (and React Native) team. There's been some great questions and insight on this thread. React Native offers a ton of benefits around productivity (and ability to use React of course), but since there are many questions about performance, I thought I'd share some of my own personal perspective on the matter. React Native is very different than other approaches because: 1. We're not promi…

Hi Jordan, I'm interested on which CSS rules causes reflows?

Avoiding CSS reflows in modern browsers should be pretty well documented, and I imagine it only makes sense to discuss reflows in a particular browser. @vjeux will cover more about the style/layout API in React Native tomorrow, but the main point I wanted to get across is that React Native's style rules are a limited subset that are generally cheaper to compute. More importantly - the result of these computations aren't given to the JS environment in a synchronous manner. You can't read/write/read/write style properties/computations and inadvertently trigger more reflows than necessary. I've seen that pattern make web experiences unusable. In React Native, reads must be done asynchronously, and they are batched together for efficiency. Not only is this one major footgun that React Native takes away, but the asynchronous nature also means that style computation (layout primarily) can be done in a different "pipeline" stage, which opens up future opportunity to parallelize that work with JS execution.

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#100

Post by rattray »

iLoch wrote: post #79

I'm part of the group that thought "what the hell?" when I first saw the React syntax - but seeing this has completely changed my mind and I'm really looking forward to picking up React as soon as possible. If this delivers on its promises (no reason to assume it won't, seeing as it's already being used in large apps) then it's going to change the mobile development landscape. It sounded like they may even be hinting…

You really don't need to use JSX; I can't stand the look of it but love using React (I use it with CoffeeScript, but don't mind it with raw JS either).
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