43 posts tagged with "announcement"

It's been one year since we open-sourced React Native. What started as an idea with a handful of engineers is now a framework being used by product teams across Facebook and beyond. Today at F8 we announced that Microsoft is bringing React Native to the Windows ecosystem, giving developers the potential to build React Native on Windows PC, Phone, and Xbox. It will also provide open source tools and services such as a React Native extension for Visual Studio Code and CodePush to help developers create React Native apps on the Windows platform. In addition, Samsung is building React Native for its hybrid platform, which will empower developers to build apps for millions of SmartTVs and mobile and wearable devices. We also released the Facebook SDK for React Native, which makes it easier for developers to incorporate Facebook social features like Login, Sharing, App Analytics, and Graph APIs into their apps. In one year, React Native has changed the way developers build on every major platform.

It's been an epic ride — but we are only getting started. Here is a look back at how React Native has grown and evolved since we open-sourced it a year ago, some challenges we faced along the way, and what we expect as we look ahead to the future.

This is an excerpt. Read the rest of the post on Facebook Code.

Earlier this year, we introduced React Native for iOS. React Native brings what developers are used to from React on the web — declarative self-contained UI components and fast development cycles — to the mobile platform, while retaining the speed, fidelity, and feel of native applications. Today, we're happy to release React Native for Android.

At Facebook we've been using React Native in production for over a year now. Almost exactly a year ago, our team set out to develop the Ads Manager app. Our goal was to create a new app to let the millions of people who advertise on Facebook manage their accounts and create new ads on the go. It ended up being not only Facebook's first fully React Native app but also the first cross-platform one. In this post, we'd like to share with you how we built this app, how React Native enabled us to move faster, and the lessons we learned.

This is an excerpt. Read the rest of the post on Facebook Code.

We introduced React to the world two years ago, and since then it's seen impressive growth, both inside and outside of Facebook. Today, even though no one is forced to use it, new web projects at Facebook are commonly built using React in one form or another, and it's being broadly adopted across the industry. Engineers are choosing to use React every day because it enables them to spend more time focusing on their products and less time fighting with their framework. It wasn't until we'd been building with React for a while, though, that we started to understand what makes it so powerful.

React forces us to break our applications down into discrete components, each representing a single view. These components make it easier to iterate on our products, since we don't need to keep the entire system in our head in order to make changes to one part of it. More important, though, React wraps the DOM's mutative, imperative API with a declarative one, which raises the level of abstraction and simplifies the programming model. What we've found is that when we build with React, our code is a lot more predictable. This predictability makes it so we can iterate more quickly with confidence, and our applications are a lot more reliable as a result. Additionally, it's not only easier to scale our applications when they're built with React, but we've found it's also easier to scale the size of our teams themselves.

Together with the rapid iteration cycle of the web, we've been able to build some awesome products with React, including many components of Facebook.com. Additionally, we've built amazing frameworks in JavaScript on top of React, like Relay, which allows us to greatly simplify our data fetching at scale. Of course, web is only part of the story. Facebook also has widely used Android and iOS apps, which are built on top of disjointed, proprietary technology stacks. Having to build our apps on top of multiple platforms has bifurcated our engineering organization, but that's only one of the things that makes native mobile application development hard.

This is an excerpt. Read the rest of the post on Facebook Code.