React Native for Android

Slightly off topic but I'm curious about using React Native vs WebView with native wrapper and components.

I'm a developer who primarily codes in Ruby. I'm working on a side project that will be mostly CRUD and have no DOM updates. The application will need to support web, mobile, and tablet. I'm considering using React so I can use React Native but I'm afraid I'm adding a level of unnecessary complexity.

Originally, I was planning to use web views and wrapping them in native components (navigation, specific ui elements) like Basecamp does (described here: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3743-hybrid-sweet-spot-native...).

I'm proficient with Java and Javascript. My experience with js frameworks is mostly with jQuery and Angular but I've created toy apps in React.

Time is a limiting factor since this is a side project. My goal is to turn this side project into a business, not learn new technical skills. Ruby and Rails is very comfortable for me.

What do you think? Should I learn RN or just stick with Rails?

It was counting down from 6 months. I think it had got down to about 3 weeks before this announcement came. The countdown was originally set based on a comment that vjeux made in a blog post when React Native for iOS was released, where he asked for 6 months of patience from the community before releasing the Android version. the reactnativeandroid.com website wasn't exactly the most patient reaction, but count me among those who are glad that it served to motivate the team to get their great work out the door. :)

I think this is a potential use case of electron http://electron.atom.io/

Running in node, you already have pretty good access to native apis via native node libraries.

It's certainly possible, but for now you could just write an app in plain React and wrap it in a web-to-native app wrapper, using something like Electron or MacGap (which Slack uses for their Mac app).

http://electron.atom.io/

https://github.com/MacGapProject/MacGap1

If you're going cross platform, the key is to know in detail the limitations of this approach, even if it takes longer to make that initial decision about what path to take.

Different cross-platform tools have different approaches, but as a concrete example take Corona SDK. You need no native platform knowledge and your app runs inside the Corona runtime, which makes some difficult things easy but some easy things -- third-party SDK integration, install source tracking -- difficult. And if the creator of the cross-platform environment has chosen not to support certain things, you're out of luck (and you're probably always going to be lagging even for things that are supported). On the other hand, you have only a single codebase to maintain and single-click builds for a lot of platforms.

As for Cordova, we spent some time testing if the performance was sufficient when building an early version of Recent News (https://recent.io -- v1.0 just released three days ago!). We concluded it was not. Boot times were slow, the UI felt very non-native, and overall performance didn't meet our requirements. Now that was a while ago and Cordova may have improved, and hardware performance certainly has improved, so maybe it's a better option today.