Right now, React is something that everyone is talking about, and is essentially a JavaScript library for building user interfaces that make code more predictable and easier to debug. Plus, it also makes it easier for developers to share code between multiple platforms. React Native is a framework that you can use to build native mobile applications with React. The framework does the mapping between native functionalities and JavaScript implementations, so the final product is a native application.
We have also found that React Native is a good tool for making prototypes quickly. We’ve already been using React in some of our projects, and we’re looking forward to taking React Native from experimentation to more serious implementations over the next few months.
As the React core team is maintained by Facebook, Instagram and a community of individual developers and corporations, the speakers were mostly Facebook employees or other developers with in-depth knowledge of React. Which, for us, was incredibly interesting to hear how they’re developing it, use it for themselves, and what we can expect from them in the future.
There were a handful of speakers that particularly stood out for us. Facebook’s Dan Abramov spoke about the rise of Redux during the last year; developer Cheng Lou talked about the spectrum of abstraction, the trade-offs between the benefits and the costs of creating abstractions; and Jonas Gebhardt presented Nuclide, a package that turns Atom into a React IDE with the aid of Flow. All talks are available at the React Europe YouTube channel.
React certainly has a large and enthusiastic community. It’s backed by Facebook, but also used by many other high-profile organisations across the globe. It seems very likely that the technology will continue to grow, because it provoked a change in UI programming paradigms that aims to be more efficient. It’s a great tool to prototype while also keeping the code ready for production.
The question of whether or not you should use the React Native in your next app project very much depends on your needs for sharing logic between platforms. If you have such a need, you should definitely consider it.
React Native can also help promote collaboration between different teams, so keep that in mind. On the downside, React Native can create some entropy in development at the start, since it forces mobile developers to work with JavaScript and learn a new framework.
Our development teams continue to closely monitor progress in these technologies. If you’d like help finding your way, just contact us for how to tackle your mobile strategy in the future.