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Introducing React Native [video]

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Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#181

Post by kccqzy »

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…

Up till this day, I still hate JSX but love the rest of React. The syntax problem though, is easy to solve. The verbosity and ugliness of XML was already contested when it was conceived, as it was being called a re-invention of S-expressions. In the end, I wrote all my React apps in sexps with paredit mode. With simple, purely syntactic macros, it's pretty pleasant.

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#182

Post by Nilzor »

robertfw wrote: post #173
Nilzor wrote: post #171

Can anyone please explain what a "declarative API" is, and why that is better than an imperative? He claims this is the best part of the framework, but I'm just left with a big "what?" since I don't understand what the hell that sentence means. I mean he admits he had to build a bunch of products before he understood the concept, but didn't waste a single slide to explain it in the presentation.

The briefest explanation is that imperative is a list of instructions describing how you want something done. A declarative approach describes what you want done. The typical example for this is SQL - you don't tell an SQL database how to run a query, you tell it what you want, and it figures it out. In Reacts case, you describe your application in terms of components that know how to render themselves given differen…

Thanks, much clearer now. :)

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#183

Post by _pmf_ »

nogridbag wrote: post #47
_pmf_ wrote: post #39

That's it. I'm finally going to port GridBagLayout to Javascript.

The memories of GridBagLayout still haunt me to this day (see username). This is a classic gridbag cartoon: http://madbean.com/anim/totallygridbag

The horrible thing is that once I use it for a while, it starts making sense. That's usually the time I stop doing Java for a while.

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#184

Post by gosia-m »

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…

We've announced a similar framework in December, it already has live-reload development with developer apps for Android and iOS https://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2015/01/15/fast-dev-roundtri...

Since React Native is using the background thread for everything, this limits what can be done with the UI. E.g. how are they going to handle user-directed animation if the operations are not run on the UI thread? These things can't be done in an async fashion... Curious to find out more about their architecture, leaving the judgement for later.

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#186

Post by sheraz »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #167
sheraz wrote: post #120

Wow. I've been struggling to teach myself objective-c, never getting beyond the simple tutorials. So I'm happy to try this out. I currently have an MVP in ionic framework and would love to port this over to react. Though I should say that Ionic is amazing in its own right. Also, I tend to agree with some of the comments in this thread -- regular Joe user can't really tell the difference. Ionic on an iPhone looks damn…

Same situation here, using Ionic, but this seems extremely cool. I'll definitely build something with ReactNative as soon as I can. We're only making a news app, but Ionic feels completely native once we optimized it correctly and use the latest beta features. As for Android being slow does that include 4.4 devices, or just older version of Android? If it's older devices, you should try the new Ionic beta with Crossw…

On your suggestion I tried it on my phone (4.1.2). The rendering improved, but speed is still an issue. Scrolling with big images is jerky.

However, I have not yet optimized images or CSS. I'll probably spend next week looking into optimizations for ionic.

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#187

Post by perryg »

sheraz wrote: post #186
squeaky-clean wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same situation here, using Ionic, but this seems extremely cool. I'll definitely build something with ReactNative as soon as I can. We're only making a news app, but Ionic feels completely native once we optimized it correctly and use the latest beta features. As for Android being slow does that include 4.4 devices, or just older version of Android? If it's older devices, you should try the new Ionic beta with Crossw…

On your suggestion I tried it on my phone (4.1.2). The rendering improved, but speed is still an issue. Scrolling with big images is jerky. However, I have not yet optimized images or CSS. I'll probably spend next week looking into optimizations for ionic.

Take a look at this blog post on improving scroll performance. https://nolanlawson.s3.amazonaws.com/www/ionic_list_perf/ind... The biggest trick is to use CSS and pseudo elements instead of actual DOM elements and bindonce wherever possible. Performant scrolling on older Android will always be tricky, even on native.

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#188

Post by nwienert »

cromwellian wrote: post #175
lomnakkus wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) Honestly, this sounds like quite a technical achievement, but... WHY? WHY? Why... are we still forced to go through these e…

Long term, I want the Web to win. Eventually I think it will. In the 90s, no one ever thought apps like Gmail, Docs, or Maps could exist in the browser, and now no one questions that an Office suite can be done. Eventually mobile performance, and API surface area will increase to the point where they're "good enough". Then they'll be an inflection point where people write Web apps for cross platform-ness for all but…

I've been working on just this for a little while now (it's not launched yet, but the ideas and code are up): http://reapp.io

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#189

Post by nwienert »

supercoder wrote: post #125
btown wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Web Workers being crippled As Tom said, you can't do layout or prerendering-to-bitmap in a web worker: there's no DOM or Canvas API unless you bring your own, and despite Emscripten it's foolhardy to bring your own. If you want to decode a JPEG, you have to do that on the main thread and pass it to the worker right now (except in Firefox with its nonstandard ImageData API). [0] Which brings us back to square one. >…

The curves used in iOS are all pretty standard, they're easily to replicate if you want. It's pretty easily to replicate iOS functionality in iOS itself just because it's a better environment, it's not the 'secret' numbers. But if taking the example of Paper, it's built on top of Pop which is absolutely open source and handles all the animations: https://github.com/facebook/pop . So in theory you should be able to re…

You should help me do this! I have physics / spring based animations in my todo for a React hybrid app platform I'm working to launch now.

Re: Introducing React Native [video]

#190

Post by phanimahesh »

gosia-m wrote: post #184
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…

We've announced a similar framework in December, it already has live-reload development with developer apps for Android and iOS https://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2015/01/15/fast-dev-roundtri... Since React Native is using the background thread for everything, this limits what can be done with the UI. E.g. how are they going to handle user-directed animation if the operations are not run on the UI thread? These things c…

The link gives me a 401. Can you please open up the page or provide credentials to access it?
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