React Native (also known as RN) is a popular JavaScript-based mobile app framework that allows you to build natively-rendered mobile apps for iOS and Android. The framework lets you create an application for various platforms by using the same codebase.
React Native was first released by Facebook as an open-source project in 2015. In just a couple of years, it became one of the top solutions used for mobile development. React Native development is used to power some of the world’s leading mobile apps, including Instagram, Facebook, and Skype. We discuss these and other examples of React Native-powered apps further in this post.
There are several reasons behind React Native’s global success.
Firstly, by using React Native, companies can create code just once and use it to power both their iOS and Android apps. This translates to huge time and resource savings.
Secondly, React Native was built based on React – a JavaScript library, which was already hugely popular when the mobile framework was released. We discuss the differences between React and React Native in detail further in this section.
Thirdly, the framework empowered frontend developers, who could previously only work with web-based technologies, to create robust, production-ready apps for mobile platforms.
Interestingly, as with many revolutionary inventions, React Native was developed as a response to…a big technological mistake.
What is cross-platform development?
Cross-platform development is the exercise of constructing a software program this is like-minded with a couple of sort of hardware platforms. A cross-platform utility can run on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and machos, or simply of them, an appropriate instance of a cross-platform utility is an internet browser or Adobe Flash that plays the same, no matter the pc or cell tool you run it on.
Cross-platform is taken into consideration the holy grail of software program improvement – you may construct your codebase as soon as after which run it on any platform, instead of software program constructed natively for a particular platform. Developers are capable of using the gear they are talented in, like JavaScript or C#, to construct systems they’re overseas too. Software proprietors also are eager on it as product improvement, in phrases of time to marketplace and costs, is reduced in half.
HOW DOES REACT NATIVE WORK?
Now that we’ve mentioned cross-platform development, let’s test the mechanics of React Native, and the way it’s distinctive from something we’ve visible before. Don’t fear if you’re now no longer a technical person – we’re going to provide an explanation for this in layman’s terms. As cited earlier, React Native is written with an aggregate of JavaScript and JXL, a unique markup code corresponding to XML.
The framework has the capacity to speak with each realm – JavaScript-primarily based totally threads and existent, local app threads. How does this verbal exchange work? React Native makes use of a so-called “bridge”. While JavaScript and Native threads are written in absolutely distinctive languages, it’s the bridge function that makes bidirectional verbal exchange possible.
WHAT MAKES REACT-NATIVE UNIQUE?
The distinction between React Native and different cross-platform improvement solutions (for example, Cordova and Phone Gap) is that React Native doesn’t render Web Views in its code. It runs on actual, local perspectives and components. This is one of the motives for React Native’s awesome success.
