As a web developer, you’ve probably heard of React and React Native and may have wondered which one to use in your project or what’s the difference between them. So if you want to know more about the differences, keep reading this article.
Let’s start in order and understand the basic terms and concepts. If you need help with your project, then we recommend you outsource software development.
What Is ReactJS?
ReactJS is a JavaScript library used for developing user interfaces. It allows us to create reusable components using JSX, a language that supports JavaScript and HTML.
What Is ReactNative?
React Native is a framework for building applications that can run on any platform, and this is its main advantage.
Differences Between React And React Native
The first thing that catches your eye is that React Native does not use HTML, but provides us with alternative components that behave similarly. For example, <Text> replaces all the tags we use to display text. React Native doesn’t traditionally use CSS, so to style components we’ll have to use StyleSheets, a JavaScript object that mimics a style sheet.
Another important difference is that, like Vue, ReactJS uses a virtual DOM for rendering, instead, ReactNative does it through APIs built into the platform it’s running on that take tags. They are converted into the appropriate language.
This gives us the advantage of greater runtime performance since the tags designed for the platform we’re running on will be used, but at the same time, it gets more difficult to set up because we have to consider where the code is.
In conclusion, both tools are capable of developing applications that run seamlessly on PCs or mobile phones, but when starting a new project, it is very important to ask yourself which platform or platforms will be used to choose the right tool.
More Features
Released in 2011, the first version of React was developed by the Instagram team to create a technology that allows you to create native applications for iOS and Android using source code.
Given this information, the language is classified as a Javascript-only library, one of the main programming language technologies.
React is currently the most in-demand library in front-end development that aims to create user interfaces (UIs).
Presenting “views” means that the language is designed to organize and present only the last screens to the user, without caring about everything else.
In addition to providing high-performance websites, React is flexible and allows you to separate all code and use it as reusable components. All HTML codes can be distributed throughout the site, which simplifies the work, and leads to a reduction in development time.
With React, you can create your own DOM, so with every rendered component, React updates the DOM with the changes made faster and more efficiently. Based on the procedures for creating websites, it is also possible to develop your applications using React Native.
Released in 2015, the first version of React Native was developed by Facebook engineers to create a fast and responsive technology.
React Native allows the source code to create native iOS and Android apps built with JavaScript.
All code is simultaneously converted to the operating system’s native language, providing a mobile and accessible structure with a tool that allows developers to contribute to the open source project, the so-called “open codes”.
The React Native action engine is JSX, a JavaScript extension used to define HTML layouts. Changes that are made on this platform cause constant updates to the data flow performed by the DOM.
However, by dealing with a responsive language, React Native has changed the development experience based on application access to UI components.
For native users, this feature made it easier to apply layout styles across different mobile platforms and brought performance benefits.
To understand the nature of React Native, you need to understand the difference between native and hybrid apps:
Native applications are developed for each platform based on the specific code of each system, whether Android or Windows, characterized by speed and optimized for mobile devices.
Hybrid applications, in turn, use web technologies and are developed for any type of platform, for example, React Native for a specific framework.
If you need help developing projects on these two platforms, then you should turn to react js developers.
