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)

Layout and Flexbox


Since Flexbox is the foundation of React Native's layout, we are going to explore it in depth. If you are already familiar with the intricacies of Flexbox, feel free to jump to the Styling the NavigationBar component section. There we will focus more on the styling of the components that we made in the previous chapter.

Flex container

The flex container is the parent element that describes how children or flex items are laid out. The flexDirection property of the container specifies the main-axis; the primary direction in which the items are rendered. The line perpendicular to the main-axis is called the cross-axis. Different flex properties on the container affect how the items are aligned across each axis. The flexDirection property has two possible values; row values for horizontal layouts (left to right) and column for vertical layouts (top to bottom). The following figure shows the flexDirection: row items aligned from left to right:

The next figure shows the items laid...