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)

Summary


In this chapter, you learned that even if React Native lacks a feature you need, you'll be able to find a Native Module that suits your needs. In our case, we need camera support for our note taking the application and we showed you how to install a great third-party module via npm. We created a new screen for our Camera component and wired it up to our note saving mechanism to store the path of the image that is captured. We then created a NoteImage screen to view the captured image and added a way to delete the images we captured.

Facebook exposes native device functionality in exactly the same way that react-native-camera does. If you're curious, you can take a look at the very simple vibration module that ships with React Native: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/tree/master/Libraries/Vibration. Even if you do not consider yourself an Objective-C, Swift, or Java programmer, don't be afraid to try creating a Native Module yourself—you might be surprised by how easy it is...