1 Getting started with React Native

 

This chapter covers

  • Introducing React Native
  • The strengths of React Native
  • Creating components
  • Creating a starter project

Native mobile application development can be complex. With the complicated environments, verbose frameworks, and long compilation times developers face, developing a quality native mobile application is no easy task. It’s no wonder the market has seen its share of solutions come onto the scene that attempt to solve the problems that go along with native mobile application development and try to make it easier.

At the core of this complexity is the obstacle of cross-platform development. The various platforms are fundamentally different and don’t share much of their development environments, APIs, or code. Because of this, we must have separate teams working on each platform, which is both expensive and inefficient.

1.1 Introducing React and React Native

1.1.1 A basic React class

1.1.2 React lifecycle

1.2 What you’ll learn

1.3 What you should know

1.4 Understanding how React Native works

1.4.1 JSX

1.4.2 Threading

1.4.3 React

1.4.4 Unidirectional data flow

1.4.5 Diffing

1.4.6 Thinking in components

1.5 Acknowledging React Native’s strengths

1.5.1 Developer availability

1.5.2 Developer productivity

1.5.3 Performance

1.5.4 One-way data flow

1.5.5 Developer experience

1.5.6 Transpilation

1.5.7 Productivity and efficiency

1.5.8 Community

1.5.9 Open source

Immediate updates

Other solutions for building cross-platform mobile applications