React Native – About
React Native is a JavaScript framework for writing real, natively rendering mobile applications for iOS and Android.
Similar to React, React Native( say RN) are written with the mixture of Javascript and JSX.
React Native also exposes JavaScript interfaces for platform APIs, so your React Native apps can access platform features like the phone camera or the user’s location. The core React Native project supports writing mobile applications for both iOS and Android. Community implementations also provide support for Windows, Ubuntu, the web, and more.
The major difference between React Native and React in the browser is that React Native does change/render the view on change of props or state changes by leveraging the UI libraries of its host platform, rather than using HTML and CSS markup.
- Advantages with React Native
- React Native actually translates your markup to real, native UI elements, leveraging existing means of rendering views on whatever platform you are working with.
- React works separately from the main UI thread, so your application can maintain high performance without sacrificing capability.
- React Native is “just” JavaScript, you don’t need to rebuild your application in order to see your changes reflected; instead, you can refresh your application just as you would any other web page.
- React Native lets you take advantage of intelligent debugging tools and error reporting.
- React native does not force you to work on the Xcode for the IOS development and Android studio for the android development.
- React Native also has impact on the production release cycle on the app published at Google or Apple play store.
- Apple and Google both allow the Javascript – only changes to app’s behaviour without going though the standard process. It’s nice preferably for the IOS, otherwise it would take long time like days or week in the review.
- Code reusability in React Native is easy in across platform. For Ex: Facebook Ad manager application for the android shares 87% of it’s codebase with the Apple’s codebase app.
Here, i took the reference from ebook “Learning React Native” , O’Reilly.