TECHNOLOGY
React Native – A Future Of Hybrid Mobile Apps
JANUARY 9, 2018
The story of React Native is quite fascinating: what started as Facebook’s internal hackathon project, in the summer of 2013, has since become one of the most popular frameworks.
The first public preview was in January of 2015 at React.js Con. In March of 2015, Facebook announced at F8 that React Native is open and available on GitHub.
After a little over a year, React Native’s growth and adoption rate doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The statistics on Github repository are impressive: 1002 contributors committed 7,971 times in 45 branches with 124 releases, and it’s 14th most starred repository on GitHub. Plus, it’s constantly updated; React Native is following a two-week train release, where a Release Candidate branch is created every two weeks.
React Native was backed up by two tech behemoths at this year’s F8 conference: both Microsoft and Samsung committed to bring React Native to Windows and Tizen. In the near future, we can expect more Universal Windows Platform and Smart TV apps to be built with React Native.
What is React Native?
React Native is a JavaScript framework for writing real, natively rendering mobile applications for iOS and Android.
It’s based on React, Facebook’s JavaScript library for building user interfaces, but instead of targeting the browser, it targets mobile platforms.
In other words: web developers can now write mobile applications that look and feel truly “native,” all from the comfort of a JavaScript library that we already know and love.
Plus, because most of the code you write can be shared between platforms, React Native makes it easy to simultaneously develop for both Android and iOs.
Similar to react for the Web, React Native applications are written using a mixture of JavaScript and XML-esque markup, known as JSX.
Then, under the hood, the React Native “bridge” invokes the native rendering APIs in Objective-C (for iOS) or Java (for Android).
Thus, your application will render using real mobile UI components, not webviews, and will look and feel like any other mobile application.
React Native also exposes JavaScript interfaces for platform APIs, so your React Native apps can access platform features like the phone camera, or the user’s location.
Some anecdota: Facebook, Palantir, and TaskRabbit are already using it in production for user-facing applications