A Deep Dive on React Native [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: A Deep Dive on React Native [video]

#31

Post by rpwverheij » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 11:03 AM UTC

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #21

I'm curious about animations. That is one thing React hasn't really figured out on the web. I think the last experiment I saw was to do all the animations manually using component state. I wonder if this is the same on Native? Ideally a cross pollination of ideas about animations would make both ecosystems better.

yes, this is a good question. I still have to implement drag and drop in a react project, and it seems the way to go is do this all through state? Which means none of the existing drag and drop solutions will work (any DOM manipulation without react knowing about it will cause trouble), and since react is relatively new there is seems there is still a need for good reusable animation components/mixins, and in the mean time, it's all a bit more manual work.

Re: A Deep Dive on React Native [video]

#32

Post by pandeiro » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 11:19 AM UTC

Has anyone who's seen the actual code comment?

From what I understood on the video, this is going to be distributed via a repo that is essentially already an iOS or Android template?

There wasn't much talk about the compilation process. Maybe the details (for the open source version) haven't been ironed out?

Re: A Deep Dive on React Native [video]

#33

Post by RivieraKid » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 11:20 AM UTC

mercer wrote: post #24

pavlov wrote: post #18

React Native is a cool project, but the deafening hype is slightly puzzling. Creating and calling native UI components from JavaScript is nothing special in itself. It's obviously possible to do it from JS just as well as from any other language -- you just need to provide the API. There you have two choices: either a bridge that translates the native API directly, or a wrapper class hierarchy. Examples of bridges in…

I think the hype is partly because many people (myself included) really like, even love React (and Flux). So being able to use it for native apps is great news for us.

Exactly this. I don't care about cross platform development. But I'd love to be able to develop UI's on Android using a similar paradigm I can do on the web with React. The main downside for me is that it's JS, not Java.

Re: A Deep Dive on React Native [video]

#34

Post by m1el » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 11:38 AM UTC

I see that they're using display:flex for layout, for all elements, which makes things like inline styles impossible or extremely inconvenient.

http://jsfiddle.net/u8wd8kdL/5/

If I am wrong, please provide me an example of how to layout that text with display:flex.

Re: A Deep Dive on React Native [video]

#35

Post by pavlov » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 11:51 AM UTC

rattray wrote: post #23

pavlov wrote: post #18

React Native is a cool project, but the deafening hype is slightly puzzling. Creating and calling native UI components from JavaScript is nothing special in itself. It's obviously possible to do it from JS just as well as from any other language -- you just need to provide the API. There you have two choices: either a bridge that translates the native API directly, or a wrapper class hierarchy. Examples of bridges in…

> but the deafening hype is slightly puzzling. > With time, React Native could become for mobile what Qt is on the desktop -- and that's high praise in my books. Sounds like maybe you're not so puzzled after all? I'm not sure what you're hearing is hype. I think it's just excitement. Nobody is declaring this as The One True Way just yet, but a lot of people (you and I included, it seems) are cautiously optimistic tha…

The excitement I've witnessed has been more of the "One True Way", "completely unprecented", "cross-platform mobile solved for good" type.

People are talking about how they'll use React Native for new apps without any regard for whether it makes sense in the particular case or not. So I tried to calm down those expectations a bit.

Re: A Deep Dive on React Native [video]

#36

Post by slight » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 11:58 AM UTC

rpwverheij wrote: post #31

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #21

I'm curious about animations. That is one thing React hasn't really figured out on the web. I think the last experiment I saw was to do all the animations manually using component state. I wonder if this is the same on Native? Ideally a cross pollination of ideas about animations would make both ecosystems better.

yes, this is a good question. I still have to implement drag and drop in a react project, and it seems the way to go is do this all through state? Which means none of the existing drag and drop solutions will work (any DOM manipulation without react knowing about it will cause trouble), and since react is relatively new there is seems there is still a need for good reusable animation components/mixins, and in the mea…

On over/drop you update your state and the view updates as appropriate yeah. Presumably some css transitions could make it pretty, I just went with straight updates as in my case it was only for personal use.

Re: A Deep Dive on React Native [video]

#37

Post by jdub » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 12:09 PM UTC

Keep in mind that this is NOT (primarily) about cross platform application development. As the developers say, "Learn once, write anywhere".

It's about building native applications in the React style (declarative, componentised), with very rapid turnaround because much of your logic and layout is defined in JavaScript. Instead of recompiling your app's native code all the time, you're just reloading JavaScript within it.

It's possible that some components could be shared between platforms, but ultimately I think most of them will be different, reflecting the UI structure of the target environment. There's probably more scope for sharing higher level non-UI-element components.

Re: A Deep Dive on React Native [video]

#38

Post by Nilzor » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 12:26 PM UTC

ianlevesque wrote: post #28

Nilzor wrote: post #25

I'm not sure I got how the Javascript code executing? For the case of Android, is the library spinning up a WebView to get access to the V8 engine?

Doubtful, they can just include a compiled JavaScript runtime.

I thought JavaScript was interpreted? Seriously, are there Linux JavaScript compilers existing - which don't depend on Node or any other JIT-compiler, and which can be integrated in Android projects?

Re: A Deep Dive on React Native [video]

#39

Post by danabramov » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 12:38 PM UTC

rattray wrote: post #22

bohol wrote: post #15

I get that people are excited, but it seems like time and time again these abstractions fail to solve the underlying problems. It's like how we never got a fix for making cross platform applications. And regardless how much people wants the new way of doing things to work, the results speak for themselves. Atom, the editor, can't even handle window re-sizing smoothly.

Did you watch the video? They're taking a genuinely new approach here. It's not "lowest common denominator" like Xamarin, Qt, etc, and it's also not a WebView like Atom or Ionic (Cordova). It's actual native components, with the intent that you "learn once, write everywhere" rather than try to jam iOS and Android into the same codebase.

To be fair, Xamarin isn't "lowest common denominator" either.

It's all native and even with xplat Xamarin.Forms you can customize code for each platform.

Re: A Deep Dive on React Native [video]

#40

Post by joemaller1 » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 12:54 PM UTC

I'm very excited about this, but can someone please write something down? The videos are nice an all, but information-wise they're incredibly low-density. If I have an hour to spend on React Native, I'd rather read for 10 minutes and experiment for the remaining 50...