4 ms·

About to make an App using React(and react native?) Up until this point, I usually would make most things from scratch and pull in libraries sparce. No big dea

About to make an App using React(and react native?) Up until this point, I usually would make most things from scratch and pull in libraries sparce. No big deal because my previous programs didnt need to. (Self taught programmer for 11 years.) For the next 3 months, I'll be working on this almost alone. Is it worth using some of my resources to hire a React developer? Also, this topic implies React will be gone in about ~5 years? That sounds good for me.

dentemple 9y ago
React's API is fairly small. Most of the code you're writing with React (outside of libraries) is based on ES6. You can easily get by with someone that has years of Javascript experience instead, preferably a developer who's familiar with Functional-style JS.
brentm 9y ago
I would learn React if I was you. Check out create-react-app on Github. It will set you up with a working app to play with in a matter of seconds. If you're expecting to use React Native it looks like they have a create-react-native-app also.
- bvm 9y ago
  and don't eject until you really need to! CRA is fantastic and surprisingly extensible.
- mkirklions 9y ago
  Right now I'm stuck working on getting SDKs installed. I got my android app running which was easy after all the installs and updates. Now I'm doing some weird command line stuff to try to get my Javascript server to wake up. Changing ports, more SDK updates, etc... Changing my App.js doesnt update, except if I turn everything off and back on again.
ashark 9y ago
> Up until this point, I usually would make most things from scratch and pull in libraries sparce. No big deal because my previous programs didnt need to. (Self taught programmer for 11 years.) You can still do this with React. Some of the most-common general-purpose libraries for working with React aren't that big and could be written from scratch pretty easily. If you recognize when something's entire purpose is apparently to replicate OO features while staying "purely" functional by jumping through a series of awkward hoops, you can recall that the language you're writing in does, in fact, support OOP, and avoid the library altogether by using built-in language features (I keep seeing this in the React ecosystem and it drives me nuts). Probably use Redux because everyone and everything expects that you are. It's easy to understand if you ignore their bad terminology and go in knowing it's just an event/messaging system, more or less. Action = event. "Action creator" = anything that dispatches an event. Reducer = your event handlers. Exactly what you'd expect from an event system with centralized event handling. Utterly mundane and non-magical. Figure out how to leverage "combineReducers" to keep your file structure sane and just go. The closest thing it has to magic going on is that when an event comes through it checks to see whether any of the refs in your "state tree" changed as a result of that event, and triggers re-renders on relevant connected view(s) (React views, in your case). That's it. Note that with a very little creativity one can decouple one's Redux code and most/all of one's business logic into its own library to share it between React and React Native. If you use React Native, you're in for a treat if you're used to fully native cross-platform dev. It really does a great job of rounding off the many, many rough corners on Android that make it such a pain-in-the-ass to work with. Warning: the ecosystem's kinda nutty and does a bad job of keeping in sync, so avoid dependencies that directly target React Native as much as possible if you want to ever be able to, say, upgrade your React Native version without breaking everything. Pure JS libs that have no truck with React Native, good. Libs that add narrowly-scoped extra native integration for RN, usually good. Mostly JS libs that add on to React Native itself, typically just a disaster waiting to happen, no matter how nice they seem at first. Oh, and use Typescript. For the love of god use Typescript. Just start the project with it, and never look back.

dentemple 9y ago

React's API is fairly small. Most of the code you're writing with React (outside of libraries) is based on ES6. You can easily get by with someone that has years of Javascript experience instead, preferably a developer who's familiar with Functional-style JS.

brentm 9y ago

I would learn React if I was you. Check out create-react-app on Github. It will set you up with a working app to play with in a matter of seconds. If you're expecting to use React Native it looks like they have a create-react-native-app also.

bvm 9y ago
and don't eject until you really need to! CRA is fantastic and surprisingly extensible.
mkirklions 9y ago
Right now I'm stuck working on getting SDKs installed. I got my android app running which was easy after all the installs and updates. Now I'm doing some weird command line stuff to try to get my Javascript server to wake up. Changing ports, more SDK updates, etc... Changing my App.js doesnt update, except if I turn everything off and back on again.

ashark 9y ago

> Up until this point, I usually would make most things from scratch and pull in libraries sparce. No big deal because my previous programs didnt need to. (Self taught programmer for 11 years.) You can still do this with React. Some of the most-common general-purpose libraries for working with React aren't that big and could be written from scratch pretty easily. If you recognize when something's entire purpose is apparently to replicate OO features while staying "purely" functional by jumping through a series of awkward hoops, you can recall that the language you're writing in does, in fact, support OOP, and avoid the library altogether by using built-in language features (I keep seeing this in the React ecosystem and it drives me nuts). Probably use Redux because everyone and everything expects that you are. It's easy to understand if you ignore their bad terminology and go in knowing it's just an event/messaging system, more or less. Action = event. "Action creator" = anything that dispatches an event. Reducer = your event handlers. Exactly what you'd expect from an event system with centralized event handling. Utterly mundane and non-magical. Figure out how to leverage "combineReducers" to keep your file structure sane and just go. The closest thing it has to magic going on is that when an event comes through it checks to see whether any of the refs in your "state tree" changed as a result of that event, and triggers re-renders on relevant connected view(s) (React views, in your case). That's it. Note that with a very little creativity one can decouple one's Redux code and most/all of one's business logic into its own library to share it between React and React Native. If you use React Native, you're in for a treat if you're used to fully native cross-platform dev. It really does a great job of rounding off the many, many rough corners on Android that make it such a pain-in-the-ass to work with. Warning: the ecosystem's kinda nutty and does a bad job of keeping in sync, so avoid dependencies that directly target React Native as much as possible if you want to ever be able to, say, upgrade your React Native version without breaking everything. Pure JS libs that have no truck with React Native, good. Libs that add narrowly-scoped extra native integration for RN, usually good. Mostly JS libs that add on to React Native itself, typically just a disaster waiting to happen, no matter how nice they seem at first. Oh, and use Typescript. For the love of god use Typescript. Just start the project with it, and never look back.