Published on Mar 19, 2018
Updated on Oct 16, 2019
React Native is much talked and developers are excited about this framework. The technology takes everything that’s great about React.js and applies it to apps leveraging developers to build mobile apps on a native platform using JavaScript, enabling better application experiences.
How better React Native is and what it promises?
React Native renders native applications for both iOS and Android mobiles. React takes charge of the view-controller and programmatically generates native views using JavaScript. It targets mobile platforms instead of targeting browsers. In other words, we can sum-up by saying, web developers are in the comfort of writing mobile applications that look and feel native, all from the JavaScript library. The upper edge in this framework is that most of the codes you write can be shared across platforms- React native makes it easy to simultaneously develop for both Android and iOS.
This means you can have all the speed and the power of a native application, with the ease of development that comes with React. The two main reasons are:
- With React Native your application logic is written and runs in JavaScript, whereas your application UI is fully native; therefore you have none of the compromises typically associated with HTML5 UI.
- React introduces a novel, radical and highly functional approach to constructing user interfaces. In brief, the application UI is simply expressed as a function of the current application state.
React Native Bridging Gaps
Similar to React for the Web, React Native applications are written using a mixture of JavaScript and XML –esque mark-up, known as JSX. Supporting both iOS and Android, React Native has the potential to expand across all the future platforms. You can really use React Native to build a production-ready mobile applications, using real mobile UI components, not web-views, and will look and feel like any other mobile application. It 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, providing a better user experience.
React Native is coming close to bridge the gap between the performance of a native app and the ease of development of a web app. When most of the frameworks do try to mimic native UI elements, the results usually “feel” just a little off; reverse-engineering all the fine details of things like animations take an enormous amount of effort, and they can quickly become out of date. In contrast, React Native actually translates your markup to real, native UI elements, leveraging existing means of rendering views on whatever platform you are working with.
In addition, React works separately from the main UI thread, so your application can maintain high performance without sacrificing capability. The update cycle in React Native is the same as in React: when props or state change, React Native re-renders the views. The major difference between React Native and React in the browser is that React Native does this by leveraging the UI libraries of its host platform, rather than using HTML and CSS markup.
Developer Comfort Zone
For developers accustomed to working on the Web with React, this means you can write mobile apps with the performance and look and feel of a native application, while using familiar tools. React Native also represents an improvement over normal mobile development in two other areas: the developer experience and cross-platform development potential.
React Native brings all of React.JS’s better app performance, DOM abstraction (as well as manipulation in virtual DOM), and simplified programming methods for hybrid mobile development – speed and agility of web app development with native results.
React Native lets you link the plugin with a native module, so you can link the map up with the device’s functions like zoom, rotate, and the compass, while using less memory and loading faster. If your app supports older operating systems (and older devices), this can help you keep the app running smoothly. Getting started with React Native is easy—especially for JavaScript pros.
In short, React Native aims to primarily bring the power of the React programming model to mobile app development. It is the future generation framework.
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