Last week I had the opportunity to attend the React Native Meetup at Zynga’s San Francisco office. With around 200 people in attendance, it served as a great place to meet other developers near me that are also interested in React Native.

I was particularly interested in learning more about how React and React Native are used at companies like Zynga, Netflix, and Airbnb. The agenda for the night would be as follows:

• Rapid Prototyping in React
• Designing APIs for React Native
• Bridging the Gap: Using React Native in Existing Codebases

But first, the event started off with a quick introduction and a brief recap of recent news:

• Did you know that React Native is now the top Java repository on GitHub?
• rnpm is now part of React Native core! You can now use react-native link in place of rnpm link to install libraries with native dependencies.
• The React Native Meetup community is growing fast! There are now over 4,800 developers across a variety of React Native meetup groups all over the globe.

If one of these meetups is held near you, I highly recommend attending!

Rapid Prototyping in React at Zynga#

The first round of news was followed by a quick introduction by Zynga, our hosts for the evening. Abhishek Chadha talked about how they use React to quickly prototype new experiences on mobile, demoing a quick prototype of a Draw Something-like app. They use a similar approach as React Native, providing access to native APIs via a bridge. This was demonstrated when Abhishek used the device's camera to snap a photo of the audience and then drew a hat on someone's head.

Designing APIs for React Native at Netflix#

Up next, the first featured talk of the evening. Clarence Leung, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, presented his talk on Designing APIs for React Native. First he noted the two main types of libraries one may work on: components such as tab bars and date pickers, and libraries that provide access to native services such as the camera roll or in-app payments. There are two ways one may approach when building a library for use in React Native:

• Provide platform-specific components
• A cross-platform library with a similar API for both Android and iOS

Each approach has its own considerations, and it’s up to you to determine what works best for your needs.

Approach #1

As an example of platform-specific components, Clarence talked about the DatePickerIOS and DatePickerAndroid from core React Native. On iOS, date pickers are rendered as part of the UI and can be easily embedded in an existing view, while date pickers on Android are presented modally. It makes sense to provide separate components in this case.

Approach #2

Photo pickers, on the other hand, are treated similarly on Android and iOS. There are some slight differences — Android does not group photos into folders like iOS does with Selfies, for example — but those are easily handled using if statements and the Platform component.

Regardless of which approach you settle on, it’s a good idea to minimize the API surface and build app-specific libraries. For example, iOS’s In-App Purchase framework supports one-time, consumable purchases, as well as renewable subscriptions. If your app will only need to support consumable purchases, you may get away with dropping support for subscriptions in your cross-platform library.

There was a brief Q&A session at the end of Clarence’s talk. One of the interesting tid bits that came out of it was that around 80% of the React Native code written for these libraries at Netflix is shared across both Android and iOS.

Bridging the Gap, Using React Native in Existing Codebases#

The final talk of the night was by Leland Richardson from Airbnb. The talk was focused on the use of React Native in existing codebases. I already know how easy it is to write a new app from scratch using React Native, so I was very interested to hear about Airbnb’s experience adopting React Native in their existing native apps.

Leland started off by talking about greenfield apps versus brownfield apps. Greenfield means to start a project without the need to consider any prior work. This is in contrast to brownfield projects where you need to take into account the existing project’s requirements, development processes, and all of the teams various needs.

When you’re working on a greenfield app, the React Native CLI sets up a single repository for both Android and iOS and everything just works. The first challenge against using React Native at Airbnb was the fact that the Android and iOS app each had their own repository. Multi-repo companies have some hurdles to get past before they can adopt React Native.

To get around this, Airbnb first set up a new repo for the React Native codebase. They used their continuous integration servers to mirror the Android and iOS repos into this new repo. After tests are run and the bundle is built, the build artifacts are synced back to the Android and iOS repos. This allows the mobile engineers to work on native code without altering their development environment. Mobile engineers don't need to install npm, run the packager, or remember to build the JavaScript bundle. The engineers writing actual React Native code do not have to worry about syncing their code across Android and iOS, as they work on the React Native repository directly.

This does come with some drawbacks, mainly they could not ship atomic updates. Changes that require a combination of native and JavaScript code would require three separate pull requests, all of which had to be carefully landed. In order to avoid conflicts, CI will fail to land changes back to the Android and iOS repos if master has changed since the build started. This would cause long delays during high commit frequency days (such as when new releases are cut).

Airbnb has since moved to a mono repo approach. Fortunately this was already under consideration, and once the Android and iOS teams became comfortable with using React Native they were happy to accelerate the move towards the mono repo.

This has solved most of the issues they had with the split repo approach. Leland did note that this does cause a higher strain on the version control servers, which may be an issue for smaller companies.

The Navigation Problem#

The second half of Leland's talk focused on a topic that is dear to me: the Navigation problem in React Native. He talked about the abundance of navigation libraries in React Native, both first party and third party. NavigationExperimental was mentioned as something that seemed promising, but ended up not being well suited for their use case.

In fact, none of the existing navigation libraries seem to work well for brownfield apps. A brownfield app requires that the navigation state be fully owned by the native app. For example, if a user’s session expires while a React Native view is being presented, the native app should be able to take over and present a login screen as needed.

Airbnb also wanted to avoid replacing native navigation bars with JavaScript versions as part of a transition, as the effect could be jarring. Initially they limited themselves to modally presented views, but this obviously presented a problem when it came to adopting React Native more widely within their apps.

They decided that they needed their own library. The library is called airbnb-navigation. The library has not yet being open sourced as it is strongly tied to Airbnb’s codebase, but it is something they’d like to release by the end of the year.

I won’t go into much detail into the library’s API, but here are some of the key takeaways:

• One must preregister scenes ahead of time
• Each scene is displayed within its own RCTRootView. They are presented natively on each platform (e.g. UINavigationControllers are used on iOS).
• The main ScrollView in a scene should be wrapped in a ScrollScene component. Doing so allows you to take advantage of native behaviors such as tapping on the status bar to scroll to the top on iOS.
• Transitions between scenes are handled natively, no need to worry about performance.
• The Android back button is automatically supported.
• They can take advantage of View Controller based navigation bar styling via a Navigator.Config UI-less component.

There’s also some considerations to keep in mind:

• The navigation bar is not easily customized in JavaScript, as it is a native component. This is intentional, as using native navigation bars is a hard requirement for this type of library.
• ScreenProps must be serialized/de-serialized whenever they're sent through the bridge, so care must be taken if sending too much data here.
• Navigation state is owned by the native app (also a hard requirement for the library), so things like Redux cannot manipulate navigation state.

Leland's talk was also followed by a Q&A session. Overall, Airbnb is satisfied with React Native. They’re interested in using Code Push to fix any issues without going through the App Store, and their engineers love Live Reload, as they don't have to wait for the native app to be rebuilt after every minor change.

Closing Remarks#

The event ended with some additional React Native news:

• Deco announced their React Native Showcase, and invited everyone to add their app to the list.
• The recent documentation overhaul got a shoutout!
• Devin Abbott, one of the creators of Deco IDE, will be teaching an introductory React Native course.

Meetups provide a good opportunity to meet and learn from other developers in the community. I'm looking forward to attending more React Native meetups in the future. If you make it up to one of these, please look out for me and let me know how we can make React Native work better for you!

Part of having a great developer experience is having great documentation. A lot goes into creating good docs - the ideal documentation is concise, helpful, accurate, complete, and delightful. Recently we've been working hard to make the docs better based on your feedback, and we wanted to share some of the improvements we've made.

Inline Examples#

When you learn a new library, a new programming language, or a new framework, there's a beautiful moment when you first write a bit of code, try it out, see if it works... and it does work. You created something real. We wanted to put that visceral experience right into our docs. Like this:

We think these inline examples, using the react-native-web-player module with help from Devin Abbott, are a great way to learn the basics of React Native, and we have updated our tutorial for new React Native developers to use these wherever possible. Check it out - if you have ever been curious to see what would happen if you modified just one little bit of sample code, this is a really nice way to poke around. Also, if you're building developer tools and you want to show a live React Native sample on your own site, react-native-web-player can make that straightforward.

The core simulation engine is provided by Nicolas Gallagher's react-native-web project, which provides a way to display React Native components like Text and View on the web. Check out react-native-web if you're interested in building mobile and web experiences that share a large chunk of the codebase.

Better Guides#

In some parts of React Native, there are multiple ways to do things, and we've heard feedback that we could provide better guidance.

We have a new guide to Navigation that compares the different approaches and advises on what you should use - Navigator, NavigatorIOS, NavigationExperimental. In the medium term, we're working towards improving and consolidating those interfaces. In the short term, we hope that a better guide will make your life easier.

We also have a new guide to handling touches that explains some of the basics of making button-like interfaces, and a brief summary of the different ways to handle touch events.

Another area we worked on is Flexbox. This includes tutorials on how to handle layout with Flexbox and how to control the size of components. It also includes an unsexy but hopefully-useful list of all the props that control layout in React Native.

Getting Started#

When you start getting a React Native development environment set up on your machine, you do have to do a bunch of installing and configuring things. It's hard to make installation a really fun and exciting experience, but we can at least make it as quick and painless as possible.

We built a new Getting Started workflow that lets you select your development operating system and your mobile operating system up front, to provide one concise place with all the setup instructions. We also went through the installation process to make sure everything worked and to make sure that every decision point had a clear recommendation. After testing it out on our innocent coworkers, we're pretty sure this is an improvement.

We also worked on the guide to integrating React Native into an existing app. Many of the largest apps that use React Native, like the Facebook app itself, actually build part of the app in React Native, and part of it using regular development tools. We hope this guide makes it easier for more people to build apps this way.

We Need Your Help#

Your feedback lets us know what we should prioritize. I know some people will read this blog post and think "Better docs? Pffft. The documentation for X is still garbage!". That's great - we need that energy. The best way to give us feedback depends on the sort of feedback.

If you find a mistake in the documentation, like inaccurate descriptions or code that doesn't actually work, file an issue. Tag it with "Documentation", so that it's easier to route it to the right people.

If there isn't a specific mistake, but something in the documentation is fundamentally confusing, it's not a great fit for a GitHub issue. Instead, post on Canny about the area of the docs that could use help. This helps us prioritize when we are doing more general work like guide-writing.

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for using React Native!

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.

React Native allows you to build Android and iOS apps in JavaScript using React and Relay's declarative programming model. This leads to more concise, easier-to-understand code; fast iteration without a compile cycle; and easy sharing of code across multiple platforms. You can ship faster and focus on details that really matter, making your app look and feel fantastic. Optimizing performance is a big part of this. Here is the story of how we made React Native app startup twice as fast.

Why the hurry?#

With an app that runs faster, content loads quickly, which means people get more time to interact with it, and smooth animations make the app enjoyable to use. In emerging markets, where 2011 class phones on 2G networks are the majority, a focus on performance can make the difference between an app that is usable and one that isn't.

Since releasing React Native on iOS and on Android, we have been improving list view scrolling performance, memory efficiency, UI responsiveness, and app startup time. Startup sets the first impression of an app and stresses all parts of the framework, so it is the most rewarding and challenging problem to tackle.

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

React Native's goal is to give you the best possible developer experience. A big part of it is the time it takes between you save a file and be able to see the changes. Our goal is to get this feedback loop to be under 1 second, even as your app grows.

We got close to this ideal via three main features:

• Use JavaScript as the language doesn't have a long compilation cycle time.
• Implement a tool called Packager that transforms es6/flow/jsx files into normal JavaScript that the VM can understand. It was designed as a server that keeps intermediate state in memory to enable fast incremental changes and uses multiple cores.
• Build a feature called Live Reload that reloads the app on save.

At this point, the bottleneck for developers is no longer the time it takes to reload the app but losing the state of your app. A common scenario is to work on a feature that is multiple screens away from the launch screen. Every time you reload, you've got to click on the same path again and again to get back to your feature, making the cycle multiple-seconds long.

Hot Reloading#

The idea behind hot reloading is to keep the app running and to inject new versions of the files that you edited at runtime. This way, you don't lose any of your state which is especially useful if you are tweaking the UI.

A video is worth a thousand words. Check out the difference between Live Reload (current) and Hot Reload (new).

If you look closely, you can notice that it is possible to recover from a red box and you can also start importing modules that were not previously there without having to do a full reload.

Word of warning: because JavaScript is a very stateful language, hot reloading cannot be perfectly implemented. In practice, we found out that the current setup is working well for a large amount of usual use cases and a full reload is always available in case something gets messed up.

Hot reloading is available as of 0.22, you can enable it:

• Open the developer menu
• Tap on "Enable Hot Reloading"

Implementation in a nutshell#

Now that we've seen why we want it and how to use it, the fun part begins: how it actually works.

Hot Reloading is built on top of a feature Hot Module Replacement, or HMR. It was first introduced by Webpack and we implemented it inside of React Native Packager. HMR makes the Packager watch for file changes and send HMR updates to a thin HMR runtime included on the app.

In a nutshell, the HMR update contains the new code of the JS modules that changed. When the runtime receives them, it replaces the old modules' code with the new one:

The HMR update contains a bit more than just the module's code we want to change because replacing it, it's not enough for the runtime to pick up the changes. The problem is that the module system may have already cached the exports of the module we want to update. For instance, say you have an app composed of these two modules:

The module log, prints out the provided message including the current date provided by the module time.

When the app is bundled, React Native registers each module on the module system using the __d function. For this app, among many __d definitions, there will one for log:

This invocation wraps each module's code into an anonymous function which we generally refer to as the factory function. The module system runtime keeps track of each module's factory function, whether it has already been executed, and the result of such execution (exports). When a module is required, the module system either provides the already cached exports or executes the module's factory function for the first time and saves the result.

So say you start your app and require log. At this point, neither log nor time's factory functions have been executed so no exports have been cached. Then, the user modifies time to return the date in MM/DD:

The Packager will send time's new code to the runtime (step 1), and when log gets eventually required the exported function gets executed it will do so with time's changes (step 2):

Now say the code of log requires time as a top level require:

When log is required, the runtime will cache its exports and time's one. (step 1). Then, when time is modified, the HMR process cannot simply finish after replacing time's code. If it did, when log gets executed, it would do so with a cached copy of time (old code).

For log to pick up time changes, we'll need to clear its cached exports because one of the modules it depends on was hot swapped (step 3). Finally, when log gets required again, its factory function will get executed requiring time and getting its new code.

HMR API#

HMR in React Native extends the module system by introducing the hot object. This API is based on Webpack's one. The hot object exposes a function called accept which allows you to define a callback that will be executed when the module needs to be hot swapped. For instance, if we would change time's code as follows, every time we save time, we'll see “time changed” in the console:

Note that only in rare cases you would need to use this API manually. Hot Reloading should work out of the box for the most common use cases.

HMR Runtime#

As we've seen before, sometimes it's not enough only accepting the HMR update because a module that uses the one being hot swapped may have been already executed and its imports cached. For instance, suppose the dependency tree for the movies app example had a top-level MovieRouter that depended on the MovieSearch and MovieScreen views, which depended on the log and time modules from the previous examples:

If the user accesses the movies' search view but not the other one, all the modules except for MovieScreen would have cached exports. If a change is made to module time, the runtime will have to clear the exports of log for it to pick up time's changes. The process wouldn't finish there: the runtime will repeat this process recursively up until all the parents have been accepted. So, it'll grab the modules that depend on log and try to accept them. For MovieScreen it can bail, as it hasn't been required yet. For MovieSearch, it will have to clear its exports and process its parents recursively. Finally, it will do the same thing for MovieRouter and finish there as no modules depends on it.

In order to walk the dependency tree, the runtime receives the inverse dependency tree from the Packager on the HMR update. For this example the runtime will receive a JSON object like this one:

React Components#

React components are a bit harder to get to work with Hot Reloading. The problem is that we can't simply replace the old code with the new one as we'd loose the component's state. For React web applications, Dan Abramov implemented a babel transform that uses Webpack's HMR API to solve this issue. In a nutshell, his solution works by creating a proxy for every single React component on transform time. The proxies hold the component's state and delegate the lifecycle methods to the actual components, which are the ones we hot reload:

Besides creating the proxy component, the transform also defines the accept function with a piece of code to force React to re-render the component. This way, we can hot reload rendering code without losing any of the app's state.

The default transformer that comes with React Native uses the babel-preset-react-native, which is configured to use react-transform the same way you'd use it on a React web project that uses Webpack.

Redux Stores#

To enable Hot Reloading on Redux stores you will just need to use the HMR API similarly to what you'd do on a web project that uses Webpack:

When you change a reducer, the code to accept that reducer will be sent to the client. Then the client will realize that the reducer doesn't know how to accept itself, so it will look for all the modules that refer it and try to accept them. Eventually, the flow will get to the single store, the configureStore module, which will accept the HMR update.

Conclusion#

If you are interested in helping making hot reloading better, I encourage you to read Dan Abramov's post around the future of hot reloading and to contribute. For example, Johny Days is going to make it work with multiple connected clients. We're relying on you all to maintain and improve this feature.

With React Native, we have the opportunity to rethink the way we build apps in order to make it a great developer experience. Hot reloading is only one piece of the puzzle, what other crazy hacks can we do to make it better?

With the recent launch of React on web and React Native on mobile, we've provided a new front-end framework for developers to build products. One key aspect of building a robust product is ensuring that anyone can use it, including people who have vision loss or other disabilities. The Accessibility API for React and React Native enables you to make any React-powered experience usable by someone who may use assistive technology, like a screen reader for the blind and visually impaired.

For this post, we're going to focus on React Native apps. We've designed the React Accessibility API to look and feel similar to the Android and iOS APIs. If you've developed accessible applications for Android, iOS, or the web before, you should feel comfortable with the framework and nomenclature of the React AX API. For instance, you can make a UI element accessible (therefore exposed to assistive technology) and use accessibilityLabel to provide a string description for the element:

Let's walk through a slightly more involved application of the React AX API by looking at one of Facebook's own React-powered products: the Ads Manager app.

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.