I’ve been flirting around with React and React Native for some time now (Not that much time actually) and the more I get to know it the more convinced I am that this is the path to chose. I’m not a fan of Facebook, but I must admit that this framework is great, looks sexy and does the job.
While learning and researching about functional programming in Javascript I’ve found that React is one of the frameworks that follows two of the most important conventions of functional programming like Pure Functions and immutability and it does it in a very elegant way. So I decided to give it a try and I did dive into it.
The first thing I did was to jump into the documentation they have on their main site and read it all, what I can say is that it gives you a clear way on how to use it, conventions and of course the way of thinking and I say way of thinking because the most difficult thing to learn about a framework or a library is not how to use it, it is how to think the way the developers and designers thought users would design their applications using it.
Next step was to do the tutorial, with I liked it a lot because it was not the classic To Do’s App that you find on AngularJs, Knockout Tools, Backbone JS tutorials (I know I am talking about some prehistoric frameworks, but hey, I’ve been doing this since 2001) this was a game and I must say it was well explained and fun to do.
Right now I’m at the Advance section of the documentation and developing my own project to start giving a good use of all that I’ve been learning, and because of one of the requirements of this personal project is a mobile version, I decided to give it a try at the same time to React Native. It is not as straight forward as ReactJS but it seems to maintain the paradigm and way of thinking, but like I said I’m still learning so I will update more on this matter soon.
Watch this space, or don’t.