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First Impressions Using React Native

jlongster.com

31–40 of 195 posts

Re: First Impressions Using React Native

#31
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of these. But React gets all of the attention despite its warts like local component state or encouraging singletons for Flux.

You can use Om if you like, right? Or Omniscient. Or Morearty. Not everyone is ready to go into FP-land right now. React lets you take these decisions yourself. Whether local state is practical for your team or not. You must be living in a very different world than mine if you think that compared to its rivals (Angular, Ember, etc), React is somehow “encouraging” local state. Sure you could go more functional than th…

There are going to be lots of different types of frameworks that encourage different patterns all backed by this concept. I'm not saying React is the worst of the bunch but I also don't think it's clearly the best.

All I'm saying is that when people praise React I wish they were really praising what you call "declarative component model".

React is receiving 100% of the attention in this space when imo it should be receiving about 75%.

Re: First Impressions Using React Native

#32
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Om if you like, right? Or Omniscient. Or Morearty. Not everyone is ready to go into FP-land right now. React lets you take these decisions yourself. Whether local state is practical for your team or not. You must be living in a very different world than mine if you think that compared to its rivals (Angular, Ember, etc), React is somehow “encouraging” local state. Sure you could go more functional than th…

There are going to be lots of different types of frameworks that encourage different patterns all backed by this concept. I'm not saying React is the worst of the bunch but I also don't think it's clearly the best. All I'm saying is that when people praise React I wish they were really praising what you call "declarative component model". React is receiving 100% of the attention in this space when imo it should be re…

>All I'm saying is that when people praise React I wish they were really praising what you call "declarative component model".

I long for time when these concepts are boring enough no one thinks of React anymore. Sadly we're not there yet.

Re: First Impressions Using React Native

#33
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Om[1] for React Native is coming. >bloated code sizes, interop issues, poor runtime performance, etc I've heard about no such problems about ClojureScript. In fact there's less code size than you'd usually have because Google Closure Compiler advanced more works with it out of the box[2]. It's also fast because immutability. [1]: https://github.com/omcljs/om [2]: http://swannodette.github.io/2015/01/06/th…

Om is fast at checking if a component's state has changed because you can do a very fast identity comparison on the persistent hash map holding state, but persistent data structures are not faster than their mutable cousins simply because of immutability. That immutability leads to significantly more objects being allocated, which means to really take advantage of these features in a managed language you need a VM wi…

Fair points.

Re: First Impressions Using React Native

#34
The code style really reminds me of ExtJS circa 2.x (not sure what it's like now), which was pretty good at what it set out to do. However, React Native requires compiling down to various different platforms which means having to maintain multiple compatibility layers to continually shift to keep up with the native vendors. You're also pretty much stuck with proprietary distributors as well. Fun. Fun.

This does look interesting, but honestly, I think this can either already, or very soon, be replicated on the web, a platform which holds tremendous advantages that native will likely never be able to catch up to. Perhaps there's an argument that these apps can also be translated to the web when their time comes, but I wonder what sacrifices are being made in the name of going Native?

React Native seems to be an attempt to fight in the opposite direction (Web -> native) while the real momentum is going the other way (native -> Web), and the best part is, you don't even have to do anything to get it, the major players are building that open ecosystem for us.

Re: First Impressions Using React Native

#35
post #11

Seriously please stop making assumptions on Titanium without knowing a thing about it. > With the latter, you're also interfacing directly with native objects all the time, which is doomed to fail performance-wise. React Native actually performs the layout on a separate thread [...] Wrong. With Titanium you work with proxies. And JS is in a separate thread. The only actual difference between ReactNative and Titanium…

I have a friend that uses Titanium a lot, so yes, I only know of it second hand. The lack of a function/reactive componentized UI paradigm forces you to work with native objects (the views) a lot. React can optimize how much it touches the bridge because you don't interface directly with the UI. From what I've seen, Titanium can't do nearly as good of a job as that because it's like the DOM. You touch the UI in sever…

For sure there’s this «don’t cross the bridge» paradigm in the community, yet I’ve never actually experienced this issue. In our biggest app, an SFA that grew other time in a big fat ass app (project that I’m quitely waiting to chop in different pieces/apps) the kind of performance issues we found we’re related to managing tableviews of… 20'000 rows! And then we switched to dynamically loaded listviews and boom. No perf issues at all.

Re: First Impressions Using React Native

#37
post #13

I love the concepts behind React, and I agree this is a huge deal...I just wish it weren't javascript. It is a terrible language, and the languages that compile to javascript are a poor substitute (bloated code sizes, interop issues, poor runtime performance, etc). For a framework that is all about state machines (a good thing! All UIs are state machines), I hate that there aren't better ways to model them in the lan…

I write React components in Coffeescript - no JSX. Concise, easy to read and write - just works beautifully.

I use CoffeeScript with JSX. It's even more easy to read and write. https://github.com/jsdf/coffee-react

Re: First Impressions Using React Native

#39

Didn't we do this already with Qt? Or Java? Or wxWidgets? Or OpenGL? Seems like cross-platform UIs have been a reality for quite some time. What does React bring to the table that these do not?

Isn't it just the specific platforms you can target? I think the point is that there's nothing that can target the browser and the phone this successfully.

Re: First Impressions Using React Native

#40

The code style really reminds me of ExtJS circa 2.x (not sure what it's like now), which was pretty good at what it set out to do. However, React Native requires compiling down to various different platforms which means having to maintain multiple compatibility layers to continually shift to keep up with the native vendors. You're also pretty much stuck with proprietary distributors as well. Fun. Fun. This does look…

How is the real momentum going the other way (native -> Web)?
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