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Facebook Brings React Native To Native Mobile Development
the_insult_dog writes Despite a lack of dev tools, samples, tutorials, documentation or even a blog post or press release, Facebook's announcement that it's bringing the popular React.js JavaScript library to iOS and Android native mobile development stirred up comments like "groundbreaking" and "game changing." In a series of videos from the recent React.js Conference 2015, Facebook engineers said they're rejecting the "write-once, run-anywhere pipe dream" in favor of a "learn-once, write-anywhere" paradigm. All efforts to duplicate native performance and look-and-feel actually feel like "s__t", an engineer said in explaining the company's new approach to native development in a conference keynote video. Yet to be proven, with tools in the works, it's supposedly a huge success internally at Facebook and experts said the new approach could shake up the whole mobile dev industry.
Hype much? If your JavaScript isn't portable enough to run on a modern mobile browser than you suck. The fact that they can make something happen that is supposed to happen by default doesn't exactly excite me.
Better known as 318230.
Judging by the Facebook App. This react is a piece of shit. Just use Objective C or Swift and stop wasting everyones time.
Facebook engineers said they're rejecting the "write-once, run-anywhere pipe dream" in favor of a "learn-once, write-anywhere" paradigm
I'm sure that is Facebook's dream: an oversupply of software developers with the skills required for employment at Facebook.
I think you missed the point. The article is talking about running javascript without the browser layer (i.e, "native" on the OS) and getting better performance out of it. This has nothing to do with javascript browser compatibility.
It's interesting technology (both react and react native). But the javascript ecosystem and tooling is a bag of shit. People put up with it on the web because you don't have a choice. The only reasonable explanation for node.js to exist is that some people are too stupid to learn php. javascript on the server or desktop or pocket is a massive step backwards. But this caters to people who are too stupid to understand that so I'm sure it will be wild success. Sometimes I think intel is bankrolling the javascript hype to sell faster processors to compensate for slower and dumber code. I also wonder if wonder if wearing skinny jeans causes mind-numbing crotch pain to the point that, relatively speaking, javascript is a pleasure to use.
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Backbone is a piece of shit. It had its time of glory, for like... 6 months. It has so many problems and design flaws, its ridiculous.
That said that isn't the point of React. If you want easy to use/maintain...yeah, you can use it, but there are significantly better libraries for that. The point of React is to generate the most efficient UI update batch job possible whenever you change your state, because if you do it yourself, either you'll end up with a totally absurd amount of code, or you'll do it in a sub optimal way. It also lets you use the same code to render the initial load on the server for deep linking and SEO purpose.
So basically React has the sweet spot between performance and maintainability. Most apps don't need that performance. If you just have a bunch of forms, a few menus, a couple of charts...whatever. Netflix was bragging on their blog about how awesome React was to them. You can look at their UI...it isn't a case where React was necessary. If they like it, sure, no problem, but it was just 1 of dozens of options that would have worked for them.
When you have a single page app with lots of interrelated dynamic updates happening constantly, then React is a good fit. Shit like Angular or Ember (even with htmlbar) go to a crawl in these scenarios no matter how good your code, and Backbone requires you to micro-manage your code like crazy.