46 posts tagged with "announcement"

We have heard from many people that there is so much work happening with React Native, it can be tough to keep track of what's going on. To help communicate what work is in progress, we are now publishing a roadmap for React Native. At a high level, this work can be broken down into three priorities:

• Core Libraries. Adding more functionality to the most useful components and APIs.
• Stability. Improve the underlying infrastructure to reduce bugs and improve code quality.
• Developer Experience. Help React Native developers move faster

If you have suggestions for features that you think would be valuable on the roadmap, check out Canny, where you can suggest new features and discuss existing proposals.

What's new in React Native​

Version 0.37 of React Native, released today, introduces a new core component to make it really easy to add a touchable Button to any app. We're also introducing support for the new Yarn package manager, which should speed up the whole process of updating your app's dependencies.

Introducing Button​

Today we're introducing a basic <Button /> component that looks great on every platform. This addresses one of the most common pieces of feedback we get: React Native is one of the only mobile development toolkits without a button ready to use out of the box.

<Button
  onPress={onPressMe}
  title="Press Me"
  accessibilityLabel="Learn more about this Simple Button"
/>

Experienced React Native developers know how to make a button: use TouchableOpacity for the default look on iOS, TouchableNativeFeedback for the ripple effect on Android, then apply a few styles. Custom buttons aren't particularly hard to build or install, but we aim to make React Native radically easy to learn. With the addition of a basic button into core, newcomers will be able to develop something awesome in their first day, rather than spending that time formatting a Button and learning about Touchable nuances.

Button is meant to work great and look native on every platform, so it won't support all the bells and whistles that custom buttons do. It is a great starting point, but is not meant to replace all your existing buttons. To learn more, check out the new Button documentation, complete with a runnable example!

Speed up react-native init using Yarn​

You can now use Yarn, the new package manager for JavaScript, to speed up react-native init significantly. To see the speedup please install yarn and upgrade your react-native-cli to 1.2.0:

$ npm install -g react-native-cli

You should now see “Using yarn” when setting up new apps:

In simple local testing react-native init finished in about 1 minute on a good network (vs around 3 minutes when using npm 3.10.8). Installing yarn is optional but highly recommended.

Thank you!​

We'd like to thank everyone who contributed to this release. The full release notes are now available on GitHub. With over two dozen bug fixes and new features, React Native just keeps getting better thanks to you.

Today we are releasing React Native 0.36. Read on to learn more about what's new.

Headless JS​

Headless JS is a way to run tasks in JavaScript while your app is in the background. It can be used, for example, to sync fresh data, handle push notifications, or play music. It is only available on Android, for now.

To get started, define your async task in a dedicated file (e.g. SomeTaskName.js):

module.exports = async taskData => {
  // Perform your task here.
};

Next, register your task in on AppRegistry:

AppRegistry.registerHeadlessTask('SomeTaskName', () =>
  require('SomeTaskName'),
);

Using Headless JS does require some native Java code to be written in order to allow you to start up the service when needed. Take a look at our new Headless JS docs to learn more!

The Keyboard API​

Working with the on-screen keyboard is now easier with Keyboard. You can now listen for native keyboard events and react to them. For example, to dismiss the active keyboard, simply call Keyboard.dismiss():

import {Keyboard} from 'react-native';

// Hide that keyboard!
Keyboard.dismiss();

Animated Division​

Combining two animated values via addition, multiplication, and modulo are already supported by React Native. With version 0.36, combining two animated values via division is now possible. There are some cases where an animated value needs to invert another animated value for calculation. An example is inverting a scale (2x --> 0.5x):

const a = Animated.Value(1);
const b = Animated.divide(1, a);

Animated.spring(a, {
  toValue: 2,
}).start();

b will then follow a's spring animation and produce the value of 1 / a.

The basic usage is like this:

<Animated.View style={{transform: [{scale: a}]}}>
  <Animated.Image style={{transform: [{scale: b}]}} />
<Animated.View>

In this example, the inner image won't get stretched at all because the parent's scaling gets cancelled out. If you'd like to learn more, check out the Animations guide.

Dark Status Bars​

A new barStyle value has been added to StatusBar: dark-content. With this addition, you can now use barStyle on both Android and iOS. The behavior will now be the following:

• default: Use the platform default (light on iOS, dark on Android).
• light-content: Use a light status bar with black text and icons.
• dark-content: Use a dark status bar with white text and icons.

...and more​

The above is just a sample of what has changed in 0.36. Check out the release notes on GitHub to see the full list of new features, bug fixes, and breaking changes.

You can upgrade to 0.36 by running the following commands in a terminal:

$ npm install --save react-native@0.36
$ react-native upgrade

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:

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { AppRegistry, Text, View } from 'react-native';

class ScratchPad extends Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <View style={{flex: 1}}>
        <Text style={{fontSize: 30, flex: 1, textAlign: 'center'}}>
          Isn't this cool?
        </Text>
        <Text style={{fontSize: 100, flex: 1, textAlign: 'center'}}>
          👍
        </Text>
      </View>
    );
  }
}

AppRegistry.registerComponent('ScratchPad', () => ScratchPad);

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.

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.