Artsy Engineering: React Native

[[)roi(]]

Interesting blog posts on why Artsy chose to switch from native development to React Native; Pros / Cons and how they overcame a number of challenges that a Javascript environment introduces. The last blog post serves as a summary of the process; challenges, pros / cons, why they did it, and how they tackled it.

http://artsy.github.io/blog/2016/08/15/React-Native-at-Artsy/
http://artsy.github.io/blog/2016/08/15/vscode/
http://artsy.github.io/blog/2017/02/05/Front-end-JavaScript-at-Artsy-2017/
http://artsy.github.io/blog/2017/02/05/Retrospective-Swift-at-Artsy/

Whilst I still prefer native buids for a number if reasons, many that are outside of the scope of the Artsy choices; it's still hard to not sit back and take notice. My biggest takeaway from these articles is that React Native style development has some big Pros over current native development, the biggest being:

• React Native includes realtime code injection, an approach that streamlines not only testing but also development.

Native builds like Swift, C# , Java, etc... have quite a way to go ITO streamlining not only compilation time, but also providing for more realtime code injection i.e. near to instant code / UI change injection and review; these are however certainly solvable problems.

As for JS development, it still sounds quite messy and this video certainly demonstrates a bit of that; but it encouraging to see that solutions like Flow and TypeScript trying to improve on the JS shortcomings. Biggest jaw dropper was the amount of dependencies; 593 just for React Native. Really not sure I could ever get used to that.

Overall I'm still not convinced that React Native and JS is the way to go...., plus there are still many open questions about the future of JS given asm.js and Webassembly.

 

[DA-LION-619]

This pic somes up React Native nicely.

 

[_kabal_]

Nice. Good to read a solid subjective opinion piece of why it works for them.

We are in a similar position, where we don't want to build dedicated native mobile teams, but rather leverage our existing skills. We went the nativescript route, due to our internal angular skills

 

[rward]

Instagram too: https://engineering.instagram.com/react-native-at-instagram-dd828a9a90c7#.rsnn7062h

 

[[)roi(]]

"Native development when put next to web development is slow."

It takes longer to build a car than a rickshaw.

https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/829864526434537472