React Native and a little test app

July 13th, 2016

React native is a format for creating Hybrid app using the React format developed by Facebook.  React  is usually used to create the view part of MVC frameworks. React native allows you to create views that are controlled by JavaScript logic on the back end .

I have recently be having issues with titanium and wanted to look into other app development platforms.

React native was fairly easy to set up. using bower and npm and the guide that was online. The main issues I encountered where around the debugger  sometimes forcing me to rebuild the application when it couldn’t connect to the application. sometimes I found it best to  turn off the debugger when I was going to reload my test application.

The other biggest frustration was to do with it being a relatively new platform . I didn’t find examples for all the features  I wanted to create and several of the examples that i did find applied to an older version of react. and the libraries needed updating in order to work with react.

The app I created is very basic food tracker app based off the slimming world plan that i am following. where different foods ave different classifications.

The results are screenshots below:

 

The first screenshot adds a food to the days entry  given a particular category.  The chart tracks the number of syns used in a day. The third page displays all the foods eaten on a given day.

The react native frame work took some getting used to. But it was an interesting framework to work with and I could see myself using on smaller projects. its modular design means functionality can be stacked together.

Overall  I think React Native has a long way to go before it will be a totally useful hybrid app system. some of its work most people seem to focus on building out ios functionality.  Since I was focusing on android for the applications development I found this particularly frustrating.

 

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