What are React and React Native?

Welcome to the magical world of React and React Native. I hope to make you feel at home here. It’s okay if this is your very first contact with these frameworks, or you may have played around with them a little bit already. This book will focus on managing state in React Native apps, but we will start by going over the basics.

If React and React Native were people, the first one would be the parent of the second one. You can focus on the child framework, but you will find great benefits in getting to know the “parent” of React Native – ReactJS.

We will start this journey by going over the history of ReactJS and specifically, why it was created. We will then continue our study of ReactJS by looking into what it means to think in React or to have the React mindset. Once we’re familiar with ReactJS, we will try to understand what cross-platform software development means and what place React Native holds in the cross-platform development ecosystem. For understanding the ecosystem, we will concentrate on React Native itself, its brief history, and its current state. We will finish our tour with a handful of examples of native apps written in React Native.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding the history of ReactJS
• Thinking in React (the React mindset)
• Understanding cross-platform software development
• Going over the history of React Native
• Reviewing examples of popular apps using React Native

By the end of this chapter, you will have high-level knowledge of React and React Native. You will also understand their place in the software development ecosystem.