6 Hacks for Developing Responsive Hybrid Apps With ReactJS

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Speed, UI ease & designing responsive websites are the most powerful possessions of ReactJS. Read the blog and check out the tricks for developing hybrid apps.

Before we get into all the important details about developing Hybrid apps with ReactJS. Lets’s first understand what Hybrid apps and ReactJS basically are, and how are they compatible?

What are Hybrid Apps?

These are like normal native applications installed on a device. However, what makes them different is these apps possess elements from native apps, we elements, even if the app is made for a specific platform. These apps are basically using a mobile view object to deploy the apps in a native container. Thanks to web technologies like CSS, javascript, HTML5, etc. the object displays the web content whenever the app is used. It is, in fact, displaying web pages from a desktop website that are adapted to a WebView display.

Brief Introduction to ReactJS

Frameworks using JavaScript have increased in popularity in the last two decades. Frameworks like Angular, Aurelia, Backbone, Chaplin, Cappuccino, Echo, Ember, until Wakanda have taken up the market place.

There’s one framework that stands out, and that is ReactJS. This brainchild of Jordan Walke, a Facebook engineer, was first developed in 2011. First deployed on the Facebook newsfeed and open-sourced in May 2013.

All high profile brands like such as Airbnb, Feedly, Netflix, and WhatsApp have been running their websites on ReactJS. Many mobility service providers swear by the ease that ReactJs provides in design the View or UI for their clientele.

A Javascript library used to build user interfaces is basically ReactJS. Maintained by Facebook developers, it is used to create complex UI’s and break them down into simple components.

This is done for easy configuration and tuning. To develop and implement user interfaces, ReactJS basically uses the Model-view-controller (MVC) software design pattern. Model is for the database; View handles the UI, and the Controller connects the model and View with logic attached to it. ReactJS is for the View in MVC.

ReactJS creates an in-memory data structure cache that stores all the changes made in the View. So, when any change is committed, only the replated component is updated instead of the entire page. It saves a lot of loading time.

To give you a deep dive into how ReactJS is used to build apps, we have included it in the article. It will basically help you to get an idea so that you can understand the hacks later.

Key Features of ReactJS

1. Easy Development with React.JS

ReactJS handles on the View in the MVC model, which makes ReactJS a less complicated framework to grasp. However, the hired developers need to be well versed in the basic JavaScript functionalities. For beginners, there’s a vast library to help them tackle any issues and problems they might face.

2. Open Source Library

There are a lot of advantages to being an open-source library. Apart from a huge community consisting of renowned developers and tech enthusiasts who constantly work on making the framework better. For example, there are no restrictions when using the ready-made templates provided by them. All these things ensure that the library has continuous updates of assets that can be used in web and mobile application development.

3. JavaScript Friendly

To combine the functionalities of JavaScript and TML, ReactJS Facebook allows the use of JSX, a syntax extension. This helps developers to focus on individual components an then combine them for easy development of high volume applications.

4. Third-party Plugin Compatibility

Extensive third party plugins help to extend the framework’s capabilities and simplifying the app-building process. ReactJS has a lot of plugins for the same, and many other organizations, like most of your frameworks, have extensive third-party plugin support. These plugins extend your framework’s capabilities to simplify the app-building process. React itself has many plugins available to extend its functionalities.

Besides React, organizations such as CentOS, Chef, JBoss, Magneto, and Joomla provide extensive plugins support for ReactJS.

5. Renders Natively and UI focused

To render the ap, ReactJS uses native components. This is a unique rendering process that gives the closest feel of the app when it is deployed. When the user tries to use the app, only the component that is in use gets rendered, not the entire page. It saves a lot of computational and rendering time, which makes the app faster and quicker. As mentioned above, ReactJS is highly UI-centric. Any and all complex UI can be broken down into individual components. This helps the developers to build complex structured apps by focusing on individual components.

6. The Class System

The class system functionality works in sync with the View in MVC. Each function can be differentiated via classes, and each class can have a set of functions and arguments. To customize the View, developers can pass the arguments to raise the requests.

7. Allows Component Reusability

ReactJS follows component reusability by following the write once, deploy anywhere code. This feature helps in process optimization along with a quick and accurate mobile app development process.

ReactJS Frameworks for Web and Mobile Application Development

There are a ton of frameworks out in the market; we are including the top 3 frameworks for mobile app development trending in the USA. This is just a brief intro about all these frameworks. For deeper knowledge and essence, you’ll have to comb through other articles related to their workings and methodologies.

1. React Native

Released just 3 years ago by Facebook, in line with the ReactJS library, React Native allows mobile development using the same JSX and Javascript that is used by ReactJS. But what differentiates the two is that Native doesn’t use HTML to render components. Instead, to give a real look and feel of the app, it renders the app on the alternate component.

2. React Bootstrap

Bootstrap is amongst the top contenders for UI implementation because of its over 400 UI elements, 600+ icons, 74 CSS animations, to name a few. The best part of bootstrap is that it doesn’t require jQuery. It is available for Angular and Vue.

3. React Toolbox

With over 30+ out of bo components, which implements Google Material design specification, the React toolbox is built on CAA and written in SASS, Webpack, and ES6. To import components bundled with CSS, they have to be converted into SAAS modules.

Tips for hybrid app development with ReactJs

As mentioned above in the intro, hybrid apps are all the rage in tech town. More and more businesses have realized their power. Tools and frameworks like ReactJs make it possible to provide native quality performance for these cross-platform applications. ReactJS is an essential tool in every developer’s frontend toolkit, which helps to develop highly interactive UIs.

1. Read and Re-Read the Official Documentation

All the developers should keep the official documentation by their side at all times. It is one of the biggest resources of information. You can also call it the holy bible for React developers. Nobody can retain all the information in one go. For a deeper understanding and seamless development, developers should try developing varied use cases. This will help them understand the concepts that aren’t that easy to grasp in first go or just by reading about them

2. Keeping the Components Small

It is much easier to code, maintain, and quality test the small components as compared to the bigger and complex ones. The exact size of the component depends on the personal preference and other requirements, but keeping the components as small as possible helps to render the specific part of the page. Developers can also add specific behaviors to the UI or make components reusable across the application for granular performance optimization.

To give you an example:

function Panel({ title, subtitle, doSomething }) {

  return (

      {title}

        {subtitle}

      Click me

  );

}

Here developers should define a small component for every individual UI element. Like

The subtitle would be:

function SubTitle({ children }) {

return <h3 className=”panel__subtitle”>children</h3>;

}

Small components increase readability, which removes the need to instead the markup again and again. You can re-use these components to recreate the desired visual elements with increased isolation, which keeps the components unaltered in case there is a need to alter the management state.

3. Use Redux.js

There a lot of merits if the developers use Redux.JS. So many that we can dedicate an entire blog post for it. We recommend this because, while ReactJS is handling the View, Redux.js makes it a lot easier to maintain the state and logic. Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps that uses a single container/store to store the entire state of the app. This gives better consistency and increased testability. It doesn’t matter how large the scale or how complex the state becomes, Redux enables the developers to specify the mutations they want to carry out in plain actions. Developers can trace every mutation and reproduce user sessions. Developers can write logic by themselves, but smart work is better than hard work where you know things can get 10 times easier.

4. Shallow Rendering

Testing and Quality assurance is not difficult, but it is surely a tricky process. It is an evolving area in the tech world. Due to this, shallow rendering is deemed as a powerful step. The reason is that, without indirectly asserting the behavior of child components, it lets us test one component as a single unit. This helps the developers render a component, leaving the sub-components as unrendered JSX. In layman language, it provides isolation to test one component at a time. This allows the developers to write tests and parametrized tests for all react components at a much higher speed.

5. React PropTypes

PropTypes are an important element and mechanism that React uses to help communication between components. Ideally, a parent component passes named prop values to its children. These prop values are then used by the children as their internal logic. However, React components contain internal property ‘props.’ This contains all the props that a component gets from its parents, and the child component gets all its messages and id from.

When multiple developers are working on an app, and one of them needs to use a child component, he/she can just search the components code for the usages of this.props object. PropTypes acts like a dictionary that defines the props of every component. Basically, they define the interface of using components that are extremely helpful in the above-mentioned scenario.

6. Write Stateless Components

One of the biggest fights that developers face while using React is that the components that have too much state. It is difficult to test when states are added to the components. To test the stateful components, developers need to figure out all the combinations of states along with the priorities and order to test them. Readability is another factor that is lost when a lot of states are added to the components. It is extremely difficult to keep track of everything, along with tracing components to monitor their behavior, that unfolds during this time.

Apart from that, states make it difficult to exchange information within the app, too. There is no doubt that some components demand sare, but developers must strive to add as little state as possible. Light components are easily readable, isolates, and even easier to understand and reason with.

Wrapping Up

Speed, UI ease, and designing responsive websites are the most powerful possessions of ReactJS. It is an ever-growing, open-sourced platform with components being added even at this moment. While developing Hybrid apps with react JS, keeping in mind these above-mentioned tips will be super helpful. It is a future-ready framework which makes the process for developers more delightful and comfortable. For beginners and professionals alike, these tricks will help streamline the development while creating wonderful apps with unbeatable UI/UX.