Book Image

React: Cross-Platform Application Development with React Native

By : Emilio Rodriguez Martinez
Book Image

React: Cross-Platform Application Development with React Native

By: Emilio Rodriguez Martinez

Overview of this book

React Native helps web and mobile developers to build cross-platform apps that perform at the same level as any other natively developed app. The range of apps that can be built using this library is huge. From e-commerce to games, React Native is a good fit for any mobile project due to its flexibility and extendable nature. This project-based book consists of four standalone projects. Each project will help you gain a sound understanding of the framework and build mobile apps with native user experience. Starting with a simple standalone car booking app, you will progressively move on to building advanced apps by adding connectivity with external APIs, using native features, such as the camera or microphone, in the mobile device, integrating with state management libraries such as Redux or MobX, or leveraging React Native’s performance by building a full-featured game. This book is ideal for developers who want to build amazing cross-platform apps with React Native. This book is embedded with useful assessments that will help you revise the concepts you have learned in this book. This book is repurposed for this specific learning experience from the content of Packt's React Native Blueprints by Emilio Rodriguez Martinez.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Setting up the Folder Structure


Let's initialize a React Native project using React Native's CLI. The project will be named messagingApp and will be available for iOS and Android devices:

react-native init --version="0.45.1" messagingApp

We will be using MobX to manage state in our app, so we will need a folder for our stores. The rest of the folder structure is standard to most React apps.

We need five screens (Chats, Chat, Login, Profile, and Search), a component (ListItem) and two stores (chats and users), which will be available through the stores/index.js file. There are also two helpers that we will be using to support our app:

  • notifications.js: All the logic related to push notifications will be stored in this file

  • firebase.js: This includes the configuration and initialization of Firebase SDK

Since we will be using MobX and several other dependencies, let's take a look at our package.json file to understand what packages we will be using:

/*** package.json ***/

{
        “name": “messagingApp...