React Native was developed by Facebook back in February 2015. During this time, he found a huge number of fans. That’s because it’s a cool framework for building native apps for iOS and Android. To program applications using React Native, we use JavaScript as the programming language instead of Swift, JAVA, or other languages, and otherwise, we use React to create the user interface.
Unlike other solutions such as Ionic, Cordova, or Phonegap, React Native does not use WebViews and does not produce HTML or CSS, i.e. does not use web technologies for your application’s interface. The question is, if you’re not using these technologies, how can you use React and JavaScript to build native apps?
Knowing that React Native apps aren’t 100% native is the first step to understanding what’s going on inside a JavaScript app to run natively.
React Native apps are made up of 3 main elements:
- Native code: A React Native project can contain native code combined with JavaScript code, meaning if you are developing an Android app, you can have JAVA code separate from the JavaScript project.
- JavaScriptCore VM: ReactNative apps use JavaScriptCore, Safari’s JavaScript execution engine, to execute our app’s JavaScript code, which means the JavaScript code you write won’t compile, it will execute as JavaScript in your app. That’s why we say it’s not 100% native because there is a virtual machine inside that executes the JavaScript code.
- React Native Bridge: As the name suggests, React Native Bridge is a bridge that is responsible for linking the JavaScript virtual machine code to the native code and native APIs of the platform our application is running on.
You may have heard of a very important concept in React applications, the Virtual DOM. Virtual DOM is a virtual representation of, as its name implies, how components should be displayed in the interface, and how rendering will be performed.
If you are not well versed in all these technologies, then we recommend that you contact the specialists at https://fireart.studio/hire-react-native-developers/. Then you can get a quality native app from professionals.
In web browsers, the virtual DOM is represented through the Document Object Model with HTML elements. The advantage of the virtual DOM being an intermediate layer between the code and the final representation of our application allows us to change the specified representation based on the description of the virtual DOM. Think of the virtual DOM as a textual specification of what the application should look like, say there will be a text input here, a red button there, etc. This specification should then be moved to the platform components where it will be visible. In the case of a web page, this means HTML elements.
For ReactNative development, a connector is implemented that takes a description of the virtual DOM and, based on it, calls the native APIs of the platform, be it iOS or Android, and represents the DOM, taking advantage of the specified native APIs. This means that, for example, when you call a View element in React Native, the connector will see how to cast it to Android and how to cast it to some native iOS API.
If you’re looking for a framework to build a native app, then React Native is the one for you. The main thing is to familiarize yourself in detail with all its features and key characteristics.
