React Native (feat. Redux) Audience Questions: React/React Native and Facebook, Application Showcase

Transcript from the "Audience Questions: React/React Native and Facebook, Application Showcase" Lesson

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>> Speaker 2: I'm kinda interested in more like the big picture for React Native and history with React. So I'm just wondering, how is Facebook involved and what's the big picture surrounding these technologies of React and React Native?
>> Scott Moss: Yeah.
>> Speaker 2: Who's involved and all that?
>> Scott Moss: So Facebook made React and they also made React Native.

[00:00:26] So React was their solution for their web problems that they were facing on Facebook. They needed something fast so they made React. A few years later, they were like, wait, you know what, React is actually really cool how to make components, what if we could make mobile UIs like that too?

[00:00:41] That would be great but we want them to be native. So they made React Native for iOS, which just took the syntax of making components and converted it over to iOS. And they built their Facebook Ads app with it or Facebook Groups. One of those apps they built with React Native, so they're all behind it.

[00:00:58] It's their baby. It's open source though, anybody can contribute to it. But most of the heavy hitters on React are at Facebook, and if not they're probably trying to hire them right now. Like the guy who made Redux, they hired him. Like come over here, come over here and work with us.

[00:01:11] So yeah, it's all Facebook's thing, I think the big picture is they want to spread this React ecosystem. They are truly invested in how React builds components, and they think it's the best way out there. And they want to get it available on every platform possible, and it's a really good way to build applications.

[00:01:29] A lot of frameworks today are influenced by React, like Angular 2 is heavily influenced by React. React came out with this virtual DOM thing and changed the game, and people were just like wow, why did we not think of that, that's amazing. So they're just trying to get that on many places as possible, and Facebook tried to do the hybrid web approach before and Mark Zuckerberg was like no, this is actually horrible.

[00:01:52] So they wanted go back to native and this is what their solution was. So the big picture is, let's get React to be the universal language for building UIs, that what they're trying to do.
>> Speaker 2: So would you call React and Angular competitors?
>> Scott Moss: Actually, I wouldn't say they're competitors because they actually work together pretty well.

[00:02:14] They meet all the time and they learn from each other. But you could, actually Angular is more of a platform than it is a framework, whereas React is more like, here's a view library, create some components. Angular is like you can create your components, here's your HTTP library, here's your testing framework, here's every single thing else you need.

[00:02:34] You don't have to install anything, here's your animations. What else do you need? We have it. Whereas React is not that, it’s just a view library. So Angular to me, Angular 2 at least, to me is more like React Native. Whereas React Native is a platform, it gives you everything, Angular 2 is like that, it's a platform that gives you everything.

[00:02:51] Whereas React for the web is actually just more like a library to me. It's just like here's a way to write components, figure everything else out yourself. And that's it. Yeah.
>> Scott Moss: Anything else?
>> Scott Moss: No, anything else, so was this stuff pretty simple today, as far as like the components, React Native?

[00:03:13] People who knew React, was it pretty simple coming in to just doing this or was it like wow, this is completely different than React?
>> Speaker 2: I think it's a game changer. I think if you wanted to, you could write an app a day.
>> Scott Moss: Exactly, it's again, when I first started writing native, I was like, I didn't believe it.

[00:03:31] I thought, I was like something's not right. Like this isn't happening, I didn't just make this. It felt weird. I thought it was like a cat like I'm waiting for them to say, but you can't publish these apps on apps.org cuz they won't, I was waiting for them to say something like that but no, it's really that simple.

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>> Speaker 2: And the legitimacy there is like that, yeah, Facebook Ads Manager and some big Facebook apps are actually on React Native and they've been in React Native for a long time. So if they would have hit major hurdles, they would have rolled it back.
>> Scott Moss: Exactly.
>> Speaker 2: And bring something different but they're still on it for quite a while.

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>> Scott Moss: Yeah, that's definitely the big thing, knowing that a big company like Facebook is using this in production themselves is like whoa, okay, this is actually something and they've been doing it for a while. Actually, if you go look at their showcase page, there are tons of actually really good apps on the React Native Showcase, some really, really, really, really good stuff for some top name companies.

[00:04:26] So here's all the Facebook stuff. These are all really good. There's actually a tutorial how to do this. There's a virtual reality app built in React Native. So this shows you what's possible there. SoundCloud. There was actually this one that does, yeah, this one right here which I was really impressed by which does Snapchat-like filters and stuff, and this is in React Native.

[00:04:53] So they had to use Web GL to do this stuff but still, like amazing, in React Native, wow. Okay, that's pretty.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, there was like Web GL bindings.
>> Scott Moss: Yeah, they have Web GL bindings and stuff where you can really do everything in React Native.
>> Speaker 3: Would that be in a web view or is it in some?

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>> Scott Moss: No, no, it's native.
>> Speaker 2: It's native.
>> Scott Moss: It's native, yeah, they got the native GL bindings.
>> Speaker 2: Open GL, I'm sorry.
>> Scott Moss: Yeah, Open GL, yeah, yeah. Open GL, yeah.
>> Speaker 2: So it will use the virtual DOM kind of thing approach with Web GL objects or components.

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>> Scott Moss: Yeah. So it's pretty legit.
>> Speaker 3: So would something like 3JS be able to wrap that or.
>> Scott Moss: Actually, I'll show you.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, 3 is Web GL so that would be in a web view.
>> Scott Moss: Yeah.
>> Speaker 2: But yeah, Open GL, React Native so.
>> Scott Moss: So this one.

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>> Scott Moss: And this is all just the, he's doing filters right here, it's ridiculous. And it's all just React Native. So, yeah, stuff like this is just like what, what, this is crazy. But yeah, they got a lot of cool stuff on the showcase. Now a lot of these actually, some of them are open source, you can go look like, the Facebook team actually open sourced its F8 app, you can go look at the source code.

[00:06:10] I actually learned a lot about React Native by looking at this code, cuz this code was written by the people who made React Native, so they knew all types of stuff that I didn't know about, really good.