Yesterday at React.js Conf Tom Occhino announced that Facebook would be releasing what they are calling React Native. Its a version of React that will render your React components to native mobile (currently iOS and Android) components instead of the DOM. This means that you will still be able to write you React code in javascript, but get the full benefits of native mobile UI components.
Here’s the keynote and announcement:
If you are not familiar with React.js, it is a javascript UI library that rethinks best practices. It re-renders the entire view for every state change, but in a “virtual dom”, and then computes the diffs from current view, and then make only the necessary changes to the actual DOM. Since interacting with the DOM is expensive, compared to the speed of javascript, this provides a performance increase, and allows to not have to worry about managing all kinds of reflows/repaints. It also helps to manage state via a one-way data flow (goodbye two-way binding) that makes it much easier to see how any view should look for a particular state.
If you haven’t already watched Peter Hunt‘s presentation at JSConf EU in 2013 about React, I suggest you watch it now!!
I have already begun using React.js for some web projects, and even inside of a Cordova mobile app, but can’t wait to see what React Native does to the world of mobile development. I think it could be huge.
