Book Image

Mastering React Native

Book Image

Mastering React Native

Overview of this book

React Native has completely revolutionized mobile development by empowering JavaScript developers to build world-class mobile apps that run natively on mobile platforms. This book will show you how to apply JavaScript and other front-end skills to build cross-platform React Native applications for iOS and Android using a single codebase. This book will provide you with all the React Native building blocks necessary to become an expert. We’ll give you a brief explanation of the numerous native components and APIs that come bundled with React Native including Images, Views, ListViews, WebViews, and much more. You will learn to utilize form inputs in React Native. You’ll get an overview of Facebook’s Flux data architecture and then apply Redux to manage data with a remote API. You will also learn to animate different parts of your application, as well as routing using React Native’s navigation APIs. By the end of the book, you will be able to build cutting-edge applications using the React Native framework.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering React Native
Credits
Disclaimer
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using native modules


In React Native, we manage dependencies to our project in much the same way as other web or Node applications, that is, using npm, the Node Package Manager. Many of the dependencies we use will contain only React Native JavaScript code, but some will have native code as well. The installation process for dependencies containing native code differs slightly from that of pure JS dependencies.

Installing native modules

In order to build out our new profile page and to make our application a bit more aesthetically pleasing, we'll use an icon library called react-native-vector-icons. The first thing we will need to do is simply install the library with npm like we would any other dependency:

npm install --save react-native-vector-icons

This library contains native modules, so we are not done yet. Most libraries that contain native modules will provide one or more additional install steps. The end goal of the installation is to link the native code from the dependency to the...