I'm part of the group that thought "what the hell?" when I first saw the React syntax - but seeing this has completely changed my mind and I'm really looking forward to picking up React as soon as possible.
If this delivers on its promises (no reason to assume it won't, seeing as it's already being used in large apps) then it's going to change the mobile development landscape.
It sounded like they may even be hinting at in-browser testing the way they were knocking on provisioning profiles and perhaps maybe even some sort of live-reload development tool? I'm really interested in seeing what kind of tools Facebook will make available along side the core React Native project. Mind you, this is a huge gift even if they don't have any fancy tools to go along with it.
I too had a WTF moment when I first saw JSX but after seeing a bunch of videos from the FB team explaining the whole concept being React and Flux it just made so much sense.
After playing around with it a little bit I have to admit it's so much better than anything else I tried (vanilla JS, jQuery, Backbone, Angular, Dojo).
React (+ Flux) is possibly a great way to introduce people to web development since it avoids common pitfalls and really allows (forces?) you to think about what you are doing more clearly.
I think everybody reacts quite viscerally to JSX the first time they see it. Mostly because it looks like something that has been tried in the past and didn't work then. It's actually not like that at all, though. It's decidedly not a template language but just an alternative syntax for JS.
It stopped me from paying attention to React until someone suggested it might be the best fit for a problem I had and I followed the introduction's plea to "give it five minutes".
Turns out it's exactly what I wanted and needed. It comes with a lot of (optional but related) other good ideas like immutability and unidirectional data flow. I can't wait to see how React Native works out.
Do you mean JSX? Because "the React syntax" is just plain JS unless you're using JSX, is it not? IIRC even vdom nodes can be created by hand with literal objects.
Yeah it's completely optional, facebook built it because they had built something similar previously and they like it, and I guess it may be simpler for "pure" designers used to HTML and stuff, but it's AOT-compiled to the corresponding JS calls and the mapping is fairly simple:
You really don't need to use JSX; I can't stand the look of it but love using React (I use it with CoffeeScript, but don't mind it with raw JS either).
Since React Native is using the background thread for everything, this limits what can be done with the UI. E.g. how are they going to handle user-directed animation if the operations are not run on the UI thread? These things can't be done in an async fashion... Curious to find out more about their architecture, leaving the judgement for later.
Up till this day, I still hate JSX but love the rest of React. The syntax problem though, is easy to solve. The verbosity and ugliness of XML was already contested when it was conceived, as it was being called a re-invention of S-expressions. In the end, I wrote all my React apps in sexps with paredit mode. With simple, purely syntactic macros, it's pretty pleasant.
If this delivers on its promises (no reason to assume it won't, seeing as it's already being used in large apps) then it's going to change the mobile development landscape.
It sounded like they may even be hinting at in-browser testing the way they were knocking on provisioning profiles and perhaps maybe even some sort of live-reload development tool? I'm really interested in seeing what kind of tools Facebook will make available along side the core React Native project. Mind you, this is a huge gift even if they don't have any fancy tools to go along with it.
Really excited, thanks FBOS team.