An Easier Way To Build Apps? Yes, Please.

Hey everybody, and welcome to my blog.  It will envelope everything I'm doing for the next four months, and may continue after that if I'm really enjoying this process (which I probably will).

This past summer,  I had an opportunity to work for a robotics company where I had an opportunity to build a web application utilizing Express.js, MongoDB, Node.js, the Pug Template Engine, and WebRTC.  It was a phenomenal experience and the project I was entirely responsible for made a direct impact for the company. If you're looking for more context, you can watch this video or if you like reading, can read about it here.  It was a very humbling experience and I really got to dive into JavaScript and all of it's goodness....but it leaves me wanting more.

How could I have improved this project?  For one, making it mobile friendly would be great but do I really want to step into both Swift and Java to develop for two platforms?  I know it would take much longer because the learning curve would be steeper, but the trade-off would be adding some more tools to my developer tool belt (and we all know we can't get enough of those).

But there has to be another way, and I think I found it.

Enter React Native. 

Being involved with Software Development for just over 2 years now, I am super excited about this JavaScript framework.  It's tag line, "Learn Once, Write Anywhere" is basically why it's so awesome.  It allows developers to build native mobile apps using JavaScript and on top of it all, it is indistinguishable from an app built using Objective-C, Java, or Swift.

The framework is built using a collection of languages which include JavaScript, Java, Objective-C, C++, Objective-C++, C, and a few others and the best part of it all is that it is built by the talented dev's at Facebook which gives it credibility.

There's a few things I'm skeptical about, considering on this date there is 593 open issues, but I'm not entirely sure how many of them are actually problems (I haven't dived into the repo in depth yet) rather than questions that I've seen in other open-source repos.  If you're interested in taking a look at React Native, check out it's website here. 

I'd like to build a few things with it (once I come up with a problem to solve) but I'm almost positive it'll be a great experience.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

- J