• June 25, 2019 10:32 am
• by Deepthy

To build native, cross-platform mobile applications we can utilize a platform called react native whereas if we need a high-performance UI layer for web and mobile apps we can employ React JS which is also referred to as React or react.js.

Key differences Between React JS and React Native

The main difference between React JS and React Native is that React JS can provide support for both server-side and frontend whereas the latter can only provide support for the front end. React JS is a javascript library that can render high-quality user interface elements whereas React Native is a framework for building native applications using Javascript. The interesting fact with React JS is that it was developed by Facebook. The quest for a dynamic and high-performance UI by the developers of Facebook ended up in the ReactJS development. React Native is having an edge compared with React JS because of its focus on a highly responsive UI and can give a native feel to your mobile applications.

React Native is also developed by Facebook in 2015 with the main goal to develop mobile applications with react. React Native is currently one of the widely used JavaScript frameworks because it allows us to develop cross-platform mobile applications and can also be used for Android. React native is in the market for over four years. React Native is purely a mobile development framework that can be used to build android, windows and hybrid iOS apps.

How long is their development time?

Both React Native and React JS can save the time of developers a lot because of the fact that they can reuse code components. There is an inbuilt feature for animation in React Native whereas React JS misses out this feature. Developers should rely on Javascript libraries or CSS for animation while using React JS. As far as the navigation is concerned on your web page or mobile application, React-router is used by React JS for navigation whereas React Native has a different library for navigation.

To render components on mobile, React Native uses native API whereas React JS uses a virtual DOM (Document Object Model) to render browser code. DOM refers to as a logical structure of various doc formats like XHTML, HTML or XML. To name a few, Facebook, Netflix, and WhatsApp use React JS and popular mobile applications such as Instagram and Skype uses React Native. There are various benefits of using React JS over other competitive technologies. React JS applications are comparatively easy to test when compared with other competitive technologies. Whereas react native is incorporated with native components that can improve its performance. React native development has a component-based structure that helps developers to build applications in a more agile way when compared with most of the hybrid frameworks.

How is their learnability?

React will be fairly easy to learn for someone who is having knowledge in javascript and allows most front-end developers to become a mobile developer. They also need to learn a bit of some native UI elements, platform-specific design patterns, and some platform APIs. Before the development of React Native, there was less developer productivity and slower deployment time in the field of native application development.

How responsive are them?

React Native gave more responsive and agile web application development along with better user experience to the users with a native application experience. React Native allows us to add React native UI components into the existing applications code and this eliminates the need of developers to rewrite the code. Developers usually don’t need to know the language of the native platform to build a React Native application. By integrating components of Objective-C, Java or swift with React Native code developers can optimize the efficiency of an application.

How is their performance?

Developer efficiency is increased due to the ability of React JS to give great performance along with an entirely managed rendering cycle for its components. React JS permits developers to have more chance to employ and make basic abstractions by assembling the distribution, creation, and utilization of reusable parts in a simple way. With the help of native APIs, React Native can render some code components whereas other cross-platform frameworks render code via WebView.React is also integrated with a set of native modules written in Java out-of-the-box. These modules are not cross-platform but they focus at a higher performance in computationally heavy operations like video playback or image editing.

What do they lack?

The major con of React JS is that the available documentation is in the developing stage because of the fact that the community is too young. This applies to its integration with additional tools. Other problems that developers encounter when working with React Native includes emulator issues, issues with react-navigation, package reinstallation issues, hot reloading failures and incompatibilities between various versions of React Native and community libraries. When Android or iOS update their SDKs, React Native often lags and this can be avoided if React Native’s team integrates a code library with new software. They cannot update every part of the APIs simultaneously even if they work pretty fast and this is the reason why there is a delay in the synchronization between React Native and new SDKs.

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