Book Image

React Native - Building Mobile Apps with JavaScript

By : Vladimir Novick
Book Image

React Native - Building Mobile Apps with JavaScript

By: Vladimir Novick

Overview of this book

<p>The emergence of React Native has made creating mobile apps in JavaScript easier for developers. This book introduces you to the React Native framework and the mobile apps development process. It starts with how React Native fits into the world of hybrid apps, and why it’s a popular framework. You’ll learn how React Native works under the hood--compiling JavaScript to Native code to bridge JavaScript and native apps. Also, you’ll learn how to write React Native components and use the ReactJS way of structuring your app. Understand how to use the industry standard Redux architecture as well as MobX--a newly emerging approach for state management--making your apps more robust and scalable.</p> <p>The mobile native world can be intimidating, with lots of platform-specific APIs. In this book, you’ll learn about the most important APIs with help of the real-world examples. You’ll also learn about the community packages that can help speed up your development. The book explains how to use these packages with JavaScript code, include native modules in your application, and write the modules yourself. Throughout the book, you will see examples of WhatsApp, Instagram, and YouTube apps and learn how to recreate them. You’ll also learn debugging and testing techniques, authentication, dealing with real data, and much more.</p> <p>At the end we will walk through design to production process of Twitter app clone and will explain application release process to App Store and Play Store</p>
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary

So, we've discussed several things about React Native. We started by learning the motivation for creating React Native, that is, its history. Then, we dived deeper into how it works under the hood.

The whole explanation of React Native architecture and threads may sound intimidating, but I personally think it's important to understand how things work under the hood before starting to get into understanding bytes and bits of framework. To distinguish parallels between web and mobile and to explain the whole React Native bridge architecture in one sentence, I think the best way will be to say that React Native communication between JavaScript Runtime and Native modules is somewhat similar to client-server interaction: both send serialized data over some kind of transport. Finally, the chapter ends by covering some of the advantages of the React Native framework.

More and more companies have started to adopt React Native for their production apps. Facebook itself uses React Native for some of their applications, and the overall growth of React Native usage has lately become exponential.

It's important to understand that React Native bridges the gap between the Native mobile development and web development and removed lots of obstacles for web developers to enter the mobile development world. I hope that you believe that the future of mobile development is in learning React Native, and the fact that you are reading this means that you are ready to take this train to the future. Enjoy your ride!

What's next? I strongly believe that real knowledge comes from hands-on experience. So, in the next chapter, the first thing we will do is to set up a development environment so that you will be able to run your first React Native application. Then, you will get familiar with important concepts of React and React Native, and it will get you prepared for creating your first React Native applications.