
How Facebook’s React Native Will Change Mobile Apps - xngzng
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/20/how-facebooks-react-native-will-change-mobile-apps/#.htuatc:kNq6
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rubyn00bie
They sort of disclose it, but the author of the article is also CEO of:

[https://www.fusetools.com/](https://www.fusetools.com/)

Which is seriously banking on cross platform development. I find this article
to be dishonest at best.

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More to the point, I hate this idea that Javascript and HTML can/should be
used everywhere. Why? What about them is good? That they're easy? For who?
N00bs?

I find writing apps for the browser to be incredibly obnoxious because of
competing APIs, absolutely mysterious memory management, and a lack of
standards. I started my programming life making my UIs with web technologies
and I can say after having done native programming-- I never want to go back.
It's actually easier (for me), and less buggy, to produce native applications
that are networked.

I find the combination of CSS, HTML, and Javascript to be a disconnected
burden. I find the plethora of competing frameworks all achieving the same
thing to be a burden. Javascript is a alright language, I certainly don't hate
it, but I just don't see any reason to use it when I have alternatives
available...

Lastly, as others have pointed out this does nothing for helping you learn the
APIs (which is the hard part). In the end, to understand the APIs you're going
to have to learn some of the language anyway-- before you know it, you're just
writing native code because it's easier.

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bryanlarsen
"I find the combination of CSS, HTML, and Javascript to be a disconnected
burden"

React Native doesn't use CSS or HTML

"I just don't see any reason to use (Javascript)"

If you need a web app and you want to share business logic between your web
app and your native clients, then Javascript (or a compile-to-Javascript
language, with the corresponding trade-offs) are your only options.

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fnayr
"Many of them [JavaScript developers] have dreaded the day they’d finally need
to learn the more complicated Objective-C, Swift and Java languages"

Learning the languages (syntax) was never the difficult part. Learning the
frameworks was. And React Native doesn't solve that.

~~~
pavlov
Absolutely true.

As a point of comparison, it seems to me that some people feel let down by
Swift because it didn't suddenly make iOS programming easy... But a
programming language can't do that on its own, when the UI framework remains
the same.

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serve_yay
At least for me the issue isn't Objc or Swift. I like Objc and have known it a
long time; Swift seems a bit half-baked currently but still I like some of the
ideas there. I find this attractive because of React-style programming
(setting state renders UI components), the ability to easily style widgets,
and the short feedback loop, while retaining the ability to write a native
app. OK, I'll admit I prefer to write JS than those other languages, but it's
not the biggest part.

I have concerns about wrapping native widgets/objects to use in JS-land, I
wonder what limitations that will incur. But overall I think there is a lot to
be said for this idea and I find it pretty exciting.

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Animats
So you write the business logic and layout in Javascript, but the platform's
native GUI elements are used.

That's what a web browser does. Is this basically a mini-browser that looks
like an "app"?

~~~
ozten
> Is this basically a mini-browser that looks like an "app"?

React native combines native UI widgets, gaining the performance and polish
that those toolkits have in delivering a polished iOS or Android look and
feel.

If react native were merely a wrapper around the embedded WebUI widget, you're
re-implementing these UI widgets with HTML, CSS and JS. You have the
performance and web standards limitations of the platforms Web UI widget.

In a way React Native is an improvement to developer workflow, bring the speed
of iterating on webapps to native mobile projects. Unlike phonegap, it avoids
the semantics of the web and targets platform specific APIs and UI guidelines.

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genu1
This was obviously written by someone who doesn't understand the "React" part
of React Native.

Can someone downvote this or get this garbage out of the feed. It's stupid
that it is even listed. Unless it's there to be made fun of as an example of
bad journalism?

~~~
Terr_
For those of us who don't know React, what is the key
misconception/misinformation here, which would allow us to recognize similar
articles as stupid?

