Not sure if I feel jealous or aghast that they are going to rewrite everything because apple launched swift... Must be amazing to work someplace with those kinds of developer resources
ComponentKit by Facebook: A React-Inspired View Framework for iOS
31–40 of 56 posts
Re: ComponentKit by Facebook: A React-Inspired View Framework for iOS
#32Re: ComponentKit by Facebook: A React-Inspired View Framework for iOS
#33This looks really cool.
However, there were a couple odd things about the talk. If you're going to spend so much time talking about managing mutation of data in a multithreaded environment, you should at least mention GCD and explain why it doesn't figure in the list of possible solutions to the problem. But the talk proceeded as if GCD did not exist, listing a few straw man bad solutions, but not the obvious go-to solution, GCD. Does the team consist of outsiders to the platform?
Similarly with Auto Layout. Why no mention? Very odd.
It sounds like the back story might be (just smelling this, no proof) that the developers are really smart, but were making the classic mistake of fighting the frameworks, and not having a good time, rather than learning the recommended way (GCD, Auto Layout, etc.) since they came from other backgrounds. Basically it's NIH syndrome.
Fortunately, what they came up with does look very nice... I can't wait to try it out. But I wish I knew what they would have to say about working WITH the frameworks that are provided, with tools like GCD and Auto Layout... how do those not solve these problems?
Re: ComponentKit by Facebook: A React-Inspired View Framework for iOS
#34Re: ComponentKit by Facebook: A React-Inspired View Framework for iOS
#35Re: ComponentKit by Facebook: A React-Inspired View Framework for iOS
#36This looks really cool. However, there were a couple odd things about the talk. If you're going to spend so much time talking about managing mutation of data in a multithreaded environment, you should at least mention GCD and explain why it doesn't figure in the list of possible solutions to the problem. But the talk proceeded as if GCD did not exist, listing a few straw man bad solutions, but not the obvious go-to s…
They mentioned why they ditched Auto Layout on obj.io
"If we switch to Apple’s Auto Layout APIs, we can do a little better: 34 lines of code. There is no longer any math or duplication — hurrah! But we’ve traded that for a different set of problems: Auto Layout is hard to set up, is difficult to debug, and suffers from poor runtime performance on complex hierarchies."
Re: ComponentKit by Facebook: A React-Inspired View Framework for iOS
#37This technology looks great. It is too bad Facebook doesn't have their own platform like iOS or Android. It's becoming pretty clear that they have a much better handle on UI technology than Apple, Google, Microsoft, or anyone really. Them creating a logical functional UI API on top of messy imperative APIs is very helpful, but even better would be if that was not necessary.
It might very well be that only having two user-facing products is what allows them to concentrate on their UI to this degree.
Re: ComponentKit by Facebook: A React-Inspired View Framework for iOS
#38This technology looks great. It is too bad Facebook doesn't have their own platform like iOS or Android. It's becoming pretty clear that they have a much better handle on UI technology than Apple, Google, Microsoft, or anyone really. Them creating a logical functional UI API on top of messy imperative APIs is very helpful, but even better would be if that was not necessary.
> a logical functional UI API on top of messy imperative APIs But without the "messy" imperative API, the functional UI cannot be built. This applies to all functional UI frameworks. It's funny that one of React's core ideas is to ditch the now old functional/declarative paradigm that is template languages and allows you to use imperative JavaScript to directly build up a virtual DOM.
I don't think that's true. Under the mutable UI trees, 60 times a second the entire UI is rendered from scratch in the OpenGL (or similar) layer. It seems to me it would be possible to completely skip that part by making a new React-like OpenGL renderer.
Re: ComponentKit by Facebook: A React-Inspired View Framework for iOS
#39This is a great idea, but the fact that it's implemented in Objective-C++ is a deal-breaker for me since I'm starting to use Swift in my iOS projects. From the docs: "ComponentKit is built on Objective-C++. There is no easy way to interoperate with Swift since Swift cannot bridge to C++."
Isn't C++ a way to adopt React/Components across different mobile platforms?
Re: ComponentKit by Facebook: A React-Inspired View Framework for iOS
#40Is MVC really as bad as all that?
I lost him when he quickly breezed through suddenly adding more arrows in all directions on the screen. Why would an inner View updating its height trigger a change to the Model?