If you’ve had a chance to play with React Native, needless to say you’ve probably had a lot of fun, and been impressed with the overall workflow.
Javascript is my primarly language, so React Native already feels like home, but the React style itself, is I believe the biggest asset for React Native. Usually, managing state in an application is one of the developer’s biggest jobs. We go through all sorts of backflips, keeping state on objects in instances, using methods to manipulate that state, and generally hoping that the state doesn’t change in any unintended way while the application is running.
React’s biggest contribution to the JS framework landscape is its focus on keeping render functions pure: meaning they should have all their inputs taken in as arguements (props) to the component. This way, the component will always rerender consistently, and the inputs just have to be modified to change the resulting DOM.
React allows JS developers to more easily embrace functional paradigms in the language. Perhaps we’ll see libraries like Immutable.js, Ramda.js, and maybe even pointfree libraries with the variety of Monads, like IO and Maybe, will become popular. I could just be dreaming, but I think JS is uniquely positioned as an all-purpose language with frameworks that make functional programming a mainstay of the web.
So here’s to React bringing functional methods to iOS / Android Development faster than Swift or Scala could accomplish!
What do you think? Let me know in the comments or reach out to me at andrew@brassington.io