Book Image

Getting Started with React Native

Book Image

Getting Started with React Native

Overview of this book

React Native is a game-changing approach to hybrid mobile development. Web developers can leverage their existing skills to write mobile applications in JavaScript that are truly native without using cross-compilation or web views. These applications have all of the advantages of those written in Objective-C or Java, combined with the rapid development cycle that JavaScript developers are accustomed to. Web developers who want to develop native mobile applications face a high barrier to entry, because they are forced to learn platform-specific languages and frameworks. Numerous hybrid technologies have tried to simplify this process, but have failed to achieve the performance and appearance that users expect. This book will show you all the advantages of true native development that React Native has without the steep learning curve, leveraging the knowledge you already have. We do this by getting you up and running quickly with a sample application. Next, we’ll introduce you to the fundamentals of creating components and explain how React Native works under the hood. Once you have established a solid foundation, you will dive headfirst into developing a real-world application from start to finish. Along the way, we will demonstrate how to create multiple screens and navigate between them,use layout and style native UI components, and access native APIs such as local storage and geolocation. Finally, we tackle the advanced topic of Native modules, which demonstrates that there are truly no limits to what you can do with React Native.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Chapter 3. Beginning with the Example Application

Now that you have an idea about how React Native works and how to create components, let's create your first React Native application. Throughout this book, we will be developing a note-taking application which we'll call ReactNotes. By the end of the book, you'll have a fully featured application that allows you to create notes, save them to a device, view the list of the notes you've saved, take pictures with the device and attach them to your notes, and much more.

In this chapter, we'll build the skeleton of the application, create a HomeScreen and NoteScreen. We'll also add navigation that allows you to switch between the screens, and along the way you'll learn about creating your own components and handling events.

The topics that we will cover in this chapter are:

  • How to generate iOS and Android project files

  • Examining the React Native starter template

  • Creating the first component, SimpleButton

  • Debugging with Chrome Developer Tools

  • Exploring...