Native mobile application development can be complex. With the complicated environments, verbose frameworks, and long compilation times developers face, developing a quality native mobile application is no easy task. It’s no wonder the market has seen its share of solutions come onto the scene that attempts to solve the problems that go along with native mobile application development and try to make it easier.
At the core of this complexity is the obstacle of cross-platform development. The various platforms are fundamentally different and don’t share much of their development environments, APIs, or code. Because of this, we must have separate teams working on each platform, which is both expensive and inefficient. But this is an exciting time in mobile application development. We’re witnessing a new paradigm in the mobile development landscape, and React Native is at the forefront of this shift in how we build and engineer mobile applications. It’s now possible to build native performing cross-platform apps as well as web applications with a single language and a single team. With the rise of mobile devices and the subsequent increase in demand for talent driving developer salaries higher and higher, React Native brings to the table the ability to deliver quality applications across all platforms at a fraction of the time and cost, while still delivering high-quality user experience and delightful developer experiences.
Introducing react native
React Native is a framework for building native mobile apps in JavaScript using the React JavaScript library; React Native code compiles to real native components. If you’re not sure what React is, it’s a JavaScript library open-sourced by and used within Facebook. It was originally used to build user interfaces for web applications. It has since evolved and can now also be used to build server-side and mobile applications (using React Native). React Native has a lot going for it. In addition to being backed and open-sourced by Facebook, it also has a tremendous community of motivated people behind it. Facebook groups, with their millions of users, are powered by React Native as well as Facebook Ads Manager. Airbnb, Bloomberg, Tesla, Instagram, Ticketmaster, SoundCloud, Uber, Walmart, Amazon, and Microsoft are some of the other companies either investing in or using React Native in production.
With React Native, developers can build native views and access native platform-specific components using JavaScript. This sets React Native apart from other hybrid app frameworks like Cordova and Ionic, which package web views built using HTML and CSS into a native application. Instead, React Native takes JavaScript and compiles it into a truly native application that can use platform-specific APIs and components.
Alternatives like Xamarin take the same approach, but Xamarin apps are built using C#, not JavaScript. Many web developers have JavaScript experience, which helps ease the transition from web to mobile app development.
There are many benefits to choosing React Native as a mobile application framework. Because the application renders native components and APIs directly, speed and performance are much better than with hybrid frameworks such as Cordova and Ionic.
With React Native, we’re writing entire applications using a single programming language: JavaScript. We can reuse a lot of code, thereby reducing the time it takes to ship a cross-platform application. And hiring and finding quality JavaScript developers is much easier and cheaper than hiring Java, Objective C, or Swift developers, leading to an overall less-expensive process.
Things you should know before delving into react native learning curve in 2020
JSX
React and React Native both encourage the use of JSX. JSX is basically a syntax extension to JavaScript that looks similar to XML. You can build React Native components without JSX, but JSX makes React and React Native a lot more readable and easier to maintain. JSX may seem strange at first, but it’s extremely powerful, and most people grow to love it. JSX is javascript in Xml format. Check out more javascript tutorials here
Threading
All JavaScript operations, when interacting with the native platform, are done in a separate thread, allowing the user interface as well as any animations to perform smoothly.
This thread is where the React application lives, and where all API calls, touch events, and interactions are processed. When there’s a change to a native-backed component, updates are batched and sent to the native side. This happens at the end of each iteration of the event loop. For most React Native applications, the business logic runs on the JavaScript thread.
React
A great feature of React Native is that it uses React. React is an open-source JavaScript library that’s also backed by Facebook. It was originally designed to build applications and solve problems on the web. This framework has become extremely popular since its release, with many established companies taking advantage of its quick rendering, maintainability, and declarative UI, among other things.
Traditional DOM manipulation is slow and expensive in terms of performance and should be minimized. React bypasses the traditional DOM with something called the virtual DOM: basically, a copy of the actual DOM in memory that only changes when comparing new versions of the virtual DOM to old versions of the virtual DOM. This minimizes the number of DOM operations required to achieve the new state.
Unidirectional data flow
React and React Native emphasize unidirectional, or one-way, data flow. Because of how React Native applications are built, this one-way data flow is easy to achieve.
Diffing
React takes the idea of diffing and applies it to native components. It takes your UI and sends the smallest amount of data to the main thread to render it with native components.
The UI is declaratively rendered based on the state, and React uses diffing to send the necessary changes over the bridge.
Thinking in components
When building a UI in React Native, it’s useful to think of your application as being composed of a collection of components. Thinking about how a page is set up, you already do this conceptually, but using concepts, names, or class names like header, footer, body, sidebar, and so on. With React Native, you can give these components names that make sense to you and other developers who may be using your code, making it easy to bring new people into a project or hand a project off to someone else.
Suppose a designer has handed you the example mockup shown in the figure below. Let’s think of how to conceptualize this into components. The first thing to do is to mentally break the UI elements into what they represent.
Example app design
With this brief overview, you can start a course on react native
