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React vs React Native: What are the differences?
React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces for web applications. While React Native is a framework to build native mobile applications using React, sharing a significant amount of code across different platforms. Here are the key differences between React and React Native:
Platform: React is primarily used for building web applications that run in web browsers. It allows developers to create interactive and dynamic user interfaces using JavaScript. On the other hand, React Native is specifically designed for developing mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms. It utilizes native components and APIs to render UI elements, resulting in native-like user experience.
Development Approach: React and React Native adopt different approaches to rendering components. In React, components are rendered to the browser's DOM, while in React Native, components are translated into native UI elements. This difference in rendering approach allows React Native to provide a more performant and native-like experience on mobile devices.
UI Components: React has a wide range of libraries and UI component ecosystems specifically built for web applications. These libraries provide ready-to-use components and functionality tailored to web development needs. React Native, on the other hand, has its own set of components that are designed to mimic native UI elements and behaviors. These components are optimized for mobile platforms and provide a more consistent look and feel across different devices.
Access to Native APIs: React Native allows developers to access and utilize device-specific functionalities like camera, geolocation, and push notifications through JavaScript APIs. This gives React Native applications the ability to leverage native capabilities without having to write platform-specific code. In contrast, React applications primarily interact with web browser APIs and may require additional frameworks or libraries for accessing native device features.
In summary, React is primarily used for web application development, while React Native is specifically designed for building mobile applications.
Hi Friends, I am new to #MobileAppDevelopment and I need to make a #CrossPlatformMobileApp. I want guidance regarding which tools should I use to build a mobile app. Main requirements: integrate Unity game engine and provide a platform for social chats.
Past experience - C++ and Python
I have tagged Flutter and React Native but if anything better than both please suggest them.
Hey, If you are using Unity you are going to have to do the end to end development on Unity, you can directly build for android and iOS on Unity. I dont see how Flutter or React Native fit into this equation. Unity is a standalone engine. As for Social Chats, you could use Firebase or your own API and integrate that in Unity in C#
I agree with Sahil. If Unity is a requirement, best way is to use just that to create your app.
If you really want, it should be possible to use Flutter and Unity together. Using Flutter Unity Widget. Although I wouldn't recommend it just yet. It's too early days.
If you do end up using it, I would be very interested in reading about your experiences.
You can start by small steps with Flutter and after Unity. Flutter = best choice to build a small cross-platform mobile app. With or no flutter, use directly Unity. Y'll have complete control but it's harder for new mobile developers. Keep in mind, the requirement is Unity!
I'm researching what Technology Stack I should use to build my product (something like food delivery App) for Web, iOS, and Android Apps. Please advise which technologies you would recommend from a Scalability, Reliability, Cost, and Efficiency standpoint for a start-up. Here are the technologies I came up with, feel free to suggest any new technology even it's not in the list below.
For Mobile Apps -
- native languages like Swift for IOS and Java/Kotlin for Android
- or cross-platform languages like React Native for both IOS and Android Apps
For UI -
- React
For Back-End or APIs -
- Node.js
- PHP
For Database -
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Cloud Firestore
- MariaDB
Thanks!
My Recommendations: Front End: Flutter because of developer tooling and powerful declarative widget system Back End: Node.js or Go because Node.js has a large ecosystem and Go has a good built in http setup Database: Cloud Firestore because of ease of use, NoSQL, and the ability to set data from the client
If you go with react / react native I advice you to go with node. Why ? I first didn't believe coding in javaScript everywhere (back, front and db queries) was making life SO much more easy. I still followed the advice, in the end this is a huge relief. For a small startup project with 1/2/3 devs, using only one langage increases efficiency a lot. You can switch very fast from a topic to another.
Considering that your objectives are Scalability, Reliability, Cost, and Efficiency, I recommend the following:
- Backend - Node.js/Express/MongoDB
- Frontend - React
- Mobile - React Native
You can then focus on using one language (JavaScript) for all the above. As your startup grows, sure, you may have other requirements that warrant using other technologies. Nevertheless, the above stack will definitely satisfy your objectives. Hope this helps!
Flutter is a new sparc out there, because it's Dart engine can run server-side, client side (as web app) and natively - it cross compiles to all major platforms from single codebase...
I'm currently working with React and I would recommend you because it will help you develop both web app and similar to React is Reactive Native which will work mobile devices. And with these frameworks, I will choose Node.js in the backend. In DB, I have experiences with MySql and MongoDB. I think you should go with MongoDB, it will help out with its cloud service also. Happy Coding!😀🤩
For UI:- Flutter / ReactJS For Backend:- NestJs For Database:- Cloud Firestore & Mysql
We thought about creating a web application for a long time, but came to the conclusion that it is better to create an adaptive site with PWA technology. This will save your budget and speed up updates (you won't need to update 3 versions of apps for different platforms, just the site). In addition, research on the preferences of smartphone users suggests that users are not very willing to install new offers for reasons of personal data security. Sites that work through the browser are more trusted.
I want to develop a mobile app for android and IOS using a RAD (Rapid application development) tool, but I don't know if such a tool exists.
I created the site for Brazilians. It tracks records of products sold on different websites. I built the entire system using a Rad tool called PhpRad, except for the scraper, for which I used a Python script.
I would like to know if it is possible to do the same using some Rad application that creates most of the code for me, such as authentication and pagination. Does anyone know any Rad application that does this for mobile? Please let me know; any suggestions are welcome. If it is a tool that uses React or React Native, even better, but if you use another technology, no problem.
As a Microsoft thing, maybe Xamarim (Forms) addresses your Rad needs. To be honest I never built an application with it, but I have built with Windows Forms and WPF. If it follows the same Philosophy, I think you will be useful for you. Good luck on your project! =)
Hello guys, I am new here. So, if I posted without specific guidelines, please ignore.
Basically, I am an iOS developer and developing native apps for the last three years. Recently, I started learning React Native to develop apps for both platforms. If anyone out there knows any useful resources that will become a better react native developer.
#newbie
Well, the first resource I would recommend you is my upcoming book by Packt Publishing, "Professional React Native", but it's due late January next year :) . Now jokes aside (the book's real by the way :) ), the easiest way to build a iOS/Android/Web app with React Native is to do: npm install -g expo-cli expo init some-project cd some-project expo eject
You might have heard of Expo, but trust me, stay away from it. Expo highest value is that it's an already pre-configured 3 platforms environment, but if you don't eject then you're vendor-locked to what Expo has to offer in iOS and Android, which is very poor compared to going full React Native on these platforms, they can't even handle Google Sign In properly and by the way, even if your app is 10 lines of code your app size will be over 40 MB if you don't eject, yep it's that bad, plus the performance is regular and the loading times slow, not to mention that you're stuck with their build service which the free tier makes you wait for hours for a free build slot. It's important to note that when ejecting you don't lose the Web, you simply do expo start --web to start your dev environment and expo build:web to build a static website that you can serve with any web server. Regarding state management, don't bother with "lifting state up" philosophies mixed with Context API to manage your state, lifting state is a great pattern and helps your codebase, Context is great to avoid prop-drilling, but NEVER mix them to achieve app-wide state management, for that, simply go for Redux or MobX, the hype is all about Redux, but I consider MobX far better in many aspects. However, as you're getting new into this I would recommend you start with Redux AND PLEASE grab yourself npm install @manaflair/redux-batch so that you can batch updates and don't bring your app to a crawl. Forget that "connect HOC" thing with React-Redux, don't bother for a second with it, go with Hooks and useSelector and useDispatch and the likes, it will make your code SO much cleaner and smaller. Adopt clean and new Hooks philosophy, avoid writing class components as much as possible and write function components augmented with Hooks.
I'm a huge fan of Vue.js and I'm pretty comfortable with it. I need to build a mobile app for my company and I was now wondering whether I could make use of VueJS with Vue Native instead of switching to React. I know Vue Native builds on top of RN. My question is whether I'd have as much freedom with Vue Native over RN and whether you feel like Vue Native is "production ready" or not. Not sure of which shortcomings I may find using Vue Native... Thanks a lot!!!
Vue Native is definitely production-ready in my experience. I've used both, have apps built with both in production right now, and both are fine technologies. As far as I can recall, there's nothing in RN that you can't do in VN. Given that, I would say go with "the devil you know".
That said, the one downside of VN over RN is that there are a lot more people using RN last I checked, so there are likely more resources readily available.
I am learning app development. I'm having difficulty finding the right frameworks and stacks to learn, with React , React native with Node.js enough to create a complete app with good ui, analytics and a strong server base. And also is there any other criteria for me to consider when building an app besides the few i listed.
I recommand you use the mean stack. This is really effective :) MongoDB -> database Express -> backend api Angular -> frontend NodeJs -> backend server
You can use react instead of angular and firebase instead of mongo. This is a good place to start :)
What is the best MVC stack to build mobile-friendly, light-weight, and fast single-page application with Spring Boot as back-end (Java)? Is Bootstrap still required to front-end layer these days?
The idea is to host on-premise initially with the potential to move to the cloud. Which combo would have minimal developer ramp-up time and low long-term maintenance costs (BAU support)?
React might be a good option if you're considering a mobile app for the future, because of react native. Although, Vue.js has the easiest learning curve and offers a better developer ramp-up time. Vue.js is great to build SPAs, very clean and organized and you won't have a lot of long-term maintenance problems (like AngularJS, for example). Bootstrap can still be used, but with flexbox there's no need anymore.
I recommend React because of less memory occupant compare to Angular, but this will depend on your organisation flexibility. When you use React you need to import different libraries as per your need. On the other side angular is a complete framework.
Performance-wise I vote for react js as it loads up quickly and lighter on the mobile. You can make good PWA with SSR as well.
If you are new to all three react will be a good choice considering, react-native will be useful if you want to build cross platform mobile application today or tomorrow. If you are talking about bootstrap styling framework than it's a choice you can style ur components by ur self or use bootstrap 4.0 framework. The complete stack mentioned above is platform agnostic u can run it anywhere you want be it cloud or on-premise.
Hi, I'm a web dev and am using Electron for a desktop app. Now I have to develop a mobile app with the following features:
- Posting/uploading files by users, private messaging between users, download files, moderation of the uploads, push notification of new posts.
- Mods can ban users and delete files.
- Share buttons from the library folder of the user phone.
- When a user uploads a photo, a pencil tool for deleting staff on the pic.
Which tool is better for such a project?
Thanks in advance
Given your experience in electron I think the shortest hop is going to be React Native. Especially since half of the requirements are server-side. Google is doing a pretty great job bringing up Flutter and the tooling is pretty great. For me however, dart seemed like quicksand and not everything is in its final home. React Native is mature, and considering my cursory analysis of your experience and the low complexity of this project, you've got quite a lot of room to grow into Javascript Land. Ultimately, my recommendation is always "play with both, see what you like, and get to know the documentation and the community." Keep your head on a swivel and set aside time to peek greener pastures, but spend most of your time delving deeply into what you're already doing.
But yeah, go with React Native first, get bored of it, learn what the shortcomings are through experience and then see if something else is really more attractive or just a new shiny.
Well, I will personally recommend to go for React Native as I have worked in both of them. React native has big community and it is easy to opt as compared to Flutter. There no doubt about the fact that Flutter is a great framework for developing both Android/IOS apps. However, you should have some experience to go for the same. Both will require prior knowledge as for React Native you have to go through Javascript first with which you are already familiar and for Flutter you need to go through Dart. So being familiar with Javascript you should go for React Native. You can go expo which has lot of inbuilt functionalities for the React Native developers.
Hi, we are an early startup (with an iPOC prototype) but need to get started on our MVP, and our tech developers in India recommended a hybrid, and they use Ionic, then we spoke with a software company in the US and he recommended Flutter or React Native. Any advice or input for us on the differences between these? Our app will need Bluetooth GPS for "near me" and social media sharing reviews capability, and also link on the backend with businesses. Thanks in advance for any help you can give!
I would never recommend you to go with Ionic, Because of the User experience it provides is subpar. Flutter is most promising, Can be easily used to develop great user experience in no time. React native is also good, but it's phasing out in my opinion, while Ionic has already phased out. Flutter also provides great developer experience, resulting in fast and productive developers. I would have to press hard to think of a CON about flutter when recommending it for your needs.
Maturity, Community, Facility, Libs React Native is the principal platform of mobile cross-platform development today, Flutter is it's a promise.
Even if React Native is older (I didn't say mature) you should go for Flutter, It's works really well and the developer experience is great (auto-completion, plugin etc). I spent years with React Native and now I am using Flutter and I don't regret It. Even if you have to learn a new language, It's pretty simple even more If you know some OOP, Java and Javascript ES6 syntax in some case. One other advantage is the facility to design app in Flutter, you have widgets for everything and you can adapt any design made by your designer. For example you can't make a simple custom box shadow with React-Native ...
Flutter is built on DART which is written in GO. GO compiles to binary. Hence is faster than any java based framework. It provides superior performance and has a simplified UI process for designing apps.
I don‘t have practical experience with flutter but between ionic and react native I‘d say both a perfectly viable options and we have used both for a number of production apps. We normally go with ionic on capacitor because we build a lot of pwa/web apps so we can use the same code for all. We don‘t use much of ionic elements, we do most styles on our own.
The comments that the user experience is bad I cannot agree with. A well designed and developed ionic apo can hardly be distinguished from a native app. But obviously that depends also on the usecase and type of app.
I hope this helps
It depends also on your team skills. Flutter is fast to learn, fast to develop with and the performance is much better in comparison to React. If your team is already highly skilled in React Native it could be the better option - if not Flutter is my 100% recommendation. We rapidly prototype and deliver MVPs with Flutter since two years.
Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"]
would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.
For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.
How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...
In my view, the upside of React is you're likely to find more existing, robust design systems (e.g. sets of components containing anything from buttons to datepickers) in the React ecosystem than Vue. UI frameworks aside, momentjs comes in when you want operate on the date(times) you get back from whatever datepicker you choose (e.g. date formatting, date match).
It was easier to find people who've worked on React than Vue. Angular did not have this problem, but seemed way too bloated compared to React. Angular also brings in restrictions working within their MVC framework. React on the other hand only handles the view/rendering part and rest of the control is left to the developers. React has a very active community, support and has lots of ready-to-use plugins/libraries available.
It is a very versatile library that provides great development speed. Although, with a bad organization, maintaining projects can be a disaster. With a good architecture, this does not happen.
Angular is obviously powerful and robust. I do not rule it out for any future application, in fact with the arrival of micro frontends and cross-functional teams I think it could be useful. However, if I have to build a stack from scratch again, I'm left with react.
one language can do simply everything(Development).
--Web Development, App Development, Desktop Development.
- You may learn java,kotlin for android development. 2.Swift or objective c for ios development. 3.php,python, or anything else for Web development including javascript.
- For desktop development you may learn c# or something like this.
- And JavaScript is playing a crucial part in entire data science workflow etc etc
Let's Come to the point ..
There are React,Vue,Anguar or node etc for Web Development. There is React Native for Android/ios development. Electron for Desktop development. All those technologies are based on javascript.
Your single programming language knowledge makes you boom...
Are you going to be love Javascript? it obviously makes you crazy than your thinking!!
- Javascripts is the most populated language in the world.
- Easy to learn & deployed production
- Fast development
- Strong community
- Completed Documents
- Native performance with lower RAM used.
- Easy to handle native issues by using native code like Java / Objective C
- Powered by Facebook.
Working on a new SaaS web/mobile app and ended up with React as our choice of Frontend JavaScript framework for SPA web version with React Native for iOS, Android, Windows clients.
The key takeaways:
Both frameworks can do the job quite well for us. This might be true for the majority of utility web apps being built out there as well, so there was no "wrong" decision here.
Vue is often cited as easier to learn and code on. But only in case your engineers never worked with either Vue or React and start learning them from scratch. In our case, we knew we'll be hiring engineers who already have experience in the framework we'll select - so it was not a big argument for Vue.
We're building our engineering team in Ukraine and realised we have 3(!) times more engineers with React experience on the market than having Vue experience.
Mobile - React Native, despite being a different framework, still shares a lot with React and it's just easier for React developers to start using React Native in days.
The strongest points for our decision:
React community is larger, means more/faster answers to your questions and existing components.
Way more experienced React engineers on the market.
React + React Native is a great combo if you're building web and mobile clients of the same app.
I used React not just because it is more popular than Angular. But the declarative and composition it gives out of the box is fascinating and React.js is just a very small UI library and you can build anything on top of it.
Composing components is the strongest asset of React for me as it can breakdown your application into smaller pieces which makes it easy to reuse and scale.
We built the first version of our app with RN and it turned out a mess in a while. A lot of bugs along with poor performance out of the box for a fairly large app. Many things, that native platform has, cannot be done with existing solutions for RN. For instance, large titles on iOS are not fully implemented in any of existing navigations libraries. Also there's painfully slow JSON bridge and many other small, yet annoying things. On the other hand Flutter became a really powerful and easy-to-use tool. A bit of a learning curve, of course, because of Dart, but it worth learning. Flutter offers TONS of built-in features, no JSON-bridge, AOT compilation for iOS.
Svelte is everything a developer could ever want for flexible, scalable frontend development. I feel like React has reached a maturity level where there needs to be new syntactic sugar added (I'm looking at you, hooks!). I love how Svelte sets out to rebuild a new language to write interfaces in from the ground up.
Our whole Vue.js frontend stack (incl. SSR) consists of the following tools:
- Nuxt.js consisting of Vue CLI, Vue Router, vuex, Webpack and Sass (Bundler for HTML5, CSS 3), Babel (Transpiler for JavaScript),
- Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed Vue.js components
- Vuetify as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
- TypeScript as programming language
- Apollo / GraphQL (incl. GraphiQL) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
- ESLint, TSLint and Prettier for coding style and code analyzes
- Jest as testing framework
- Google Fonts and Font Awesome for typography and icon toolkit
- NativeScript-Vue for mobile development
The main reason we have chosen Vue.js over React and AngularJS is related to the following artifacts:
- Empowered HTML. Vue.js has many similar approaches with Angular. This helps to optimize HTML blocks handling with the use of different components.
- Detailed documentation. Vue.js has very good documentation which can fasten learning curve for developers.
- Adaptability. It provides a rapid switching period from other frameworks. It has similarities with Angular and React in terms of design and architecture.
- Awesome integration. Vue.js can be used for both building single-page applications and more difficult web interfaces of apps. Smaller interactive parts can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure with no negative effect on the entire system.
- Large scaling. Vue.js can help to develop pretty large reusable templates.
- Tiny size. Vue.js weights around 20KB keeping its speed and flexibility. It allows reaching much better performance in comparison to other frameworks.
The project is a web gadget previously made using vanilla script and JQuery, It is a part of the "Quicktext" platform and offers an in-app live & customizable messaging widget. We made that remake with React eco-system and Typescript and we're so far happy with results. We gained tons of TS features, React scaling & re-usabilities capabilities and much more!
What do you think?
Pros of React
- Components832
- Virtual dom673
- Performance578
- Simplicity508
- Composable442
- Data flow186
- Declarative166
- Isn't an mvc framework128
- Reactive updates120
- Explicit app state115
- JSX50
- Learn once, write everywhere29
- Easy to Use22
- Uni-directional data flow21
- Works great with Flux Architecture17
- Great perfomance11
- Javascript10
- Built by Facebook9
- TypeScript support8
- Server Side Rendering6
- Speed6
- Feels like the 90s5
- Excellent Documentation5
- Props5
- Functional5
- Easy as Lego5
- Closer to standard JavaScript and HTML than others5
- Cross-platform5
- Easy to start5
- Hooks5
- Awesome5
- Scalable5
- Super easy4
- Allows creating single page applications4
- Server side views4
- Sdfsdfsdf4
- Start simple4
- Strong Community4
- Fancy third party tools4
- Scales super well4
- Has arrow functions3
- Beautiful and Neat Component Management3
- Just the View of MVC3
- Simple, easy to reason about and makes you productive3
- Fast evolving3
- SSR3
- Great migration pathway for older systems3
- Rich ecosystem3
- Simple3
- Has functional components3
- Every decision architecture wise makes sense3
- Very gentle learning curve3
- Split your UI into components with one true state2
- Image upload2
- Permissively-licensed2
- Fragments2
- Sharable2
- Recharts2
- HTML-like2
- React hooks1
- Datatables1
Pros of React Native
- Learn once write everywhere214
- Cross platform174
- Javascript168
- Native ios components122
- Built by facebook69
- Easy to learn65
- Bridges me into ios development45
- It's just react40
- No compile39
- Declarative36
- Fast22
- Virtual Dom13
- Insanely fast develop / test cycle12
- Livereload12
- Great community11
- It is free and open source9
- Native android components9
- Easy setup9
- Backed by Facebook9
- Highly customizable7
- Scalable7
- Awesome6
- Everything component6
- Great errors6
- Win win solution of hybrid app6
- Not dependent on anything such as Angular5
- Simple5
- Awesome, easy starting from scratch4
- OTA update4
- As good as Native without any performance concerns3
- Easy to use3
- Many salary2
- Can be incrementally added to existing native apps2
- Hot reload2
- Over the air update (Flutter lacks)2
- 'It's just react'2
- Web development meets Mobile development2
- Ngon1
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Cons of React
- Requires discipline to keep architecture organized41
- No predefined way to structure your app30
- Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages29
- JSX13
- Not enterprise friendly10
- One-way binding only6
- State consistency with backend neglected3
- Bad Documentation3
- Error boundary is needed2
- Paradigms change too fast2
Cons of React Native
- Javascript23
- Built by facebook19
- Cant use CSS12
- 30 FPS Limit4
- Slow2
- Generate large apk even for a simple app2
- Some compenents not truly native2