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

Watchman


Watchman is an open source tool created by Facebook (https://facebook.github.io/watchman/). React Native's packager uses Watchman to recursively watch for changes to our source code files across one or more directory trees. Once it detects a change, it automatically rebuilds the JavaScript bundle. This allows us to sidestep one of the slowest and most painful parts of native development.

Much like several of our other tools, once Watchman is installed, you won't have to worry about it. The React Native Package Manager handles running Watchman for us.

Flow

Unlike the other tools mentioned, Flow is entirely optional. Flow is yet another open source tool created by the Facebook team (http://flowtype.org/). It's used to add type annotations to our JavaScript code. JavaScript, as you likely already know, is a dynamically typed language. This means you never need to declare a variable as an int or a string. You just declare a variable and set a value. The type is implicitly set based on...