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What Makes React Native a Versatile Business Solution?

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Choosing the right framework for your business’s mobile app may seem inconsequential. To non-developers, languages and frameworks may feel like interchangeable equal paths to building your web or mobile app. But the truth is there are significant business advantages to choosing the right technologies. React Native is a mobile framework that was introduced in 2015 and has built a significant reputation. But is it deserved? Is it the right solution for your business’s app?

What is React Native?

There are many viable mobile app frameworks, but a few things make React Native unique among the options. First and foremost is that React Native is a cross-platform framework, versatile for developing apps for both iOS and Android, as opposed to native apps built strictly for one platform. The code base requires some performance configuration between the platforms, but the bulk of it will apply to both systems – up to 95% shared code. While native apps are built to perform for their platform from inception, the decision to launch on a second platform can be a costly one, requiring an effort akin to rebuilding from scratch. React Native’s versatility affords a significant savings in time and money for a product with goals that include both platforms.

In React Native, all the logic is in JavaScript – the world’s most widely used coding language. It uses a single base code for all UI components and converts them into iOS or Android views. Developed out of a Facebook hackathon, React Native enjoys a usefulness and importance beyond the cache of having a behemoth like Facebook behind it.

What makes React Native attractive?

Having powerhouse players invested has its advantages. Uber Eats, Discord, Instagram, and Walmart are just a few of the giants that rely on React Native. That backing insures React Native’s longevity as a well-supported technology. As an open-source framework with wide usage in general, it benefits from a large community of developers providing constant attention and scrutiny.

There are also more tangible values that React Native offers, including cost-effectiveness, good availability of developer talent, shorter lead time to market, and regular code maintenance. For developers, the wide use means that there are a lot of other people out there solving the same problems, making the solutions to their puzzles easier to find. Live reload capacity in React Native also allows developers to view the latest code changes instantly, minimizing the lag cycle of staging and rework, and getting your features to market more quickly. 

A significant saving of time, money, and heartache in the development process comes from the reusability of UI components, which allows iOS and Android to share so much code. With that structure, many bugs in your application can be fixed to both platforms with one effort.

Why is React Native a good business solution?

With React Native, your business’s strategic decision of choosing to reach either iOS or Android customers is no longer “if” but “when.” At this point, it’s pretty clear that there’s significant time and cost savings found in the mutual development for both platforms with React Native. And building a true mobile app has better performance and other advantages over other quicker, cheaper solutions such as web-based mobile. But there are also factors that make React Native the perfect choice for a startup.

Building with React Native provides quick-to-market capability. It’s a great platform for building an MVP due to code efficiency and quicker development timelines. React Native’s component structure allows a product to start small and build on it piece by piece, feature by feature in response to customer needs or investor requests. Building an MVP quickly is also a bonus to tight budgets, allowing you to collect feedback before prioritizing the next features.

Your app’s UX is important to investors, and making a good show is crucial to impressing them. Stability and good usability in a product translates to a good customer experience and good sales. React Native makes UX a priority. It’s also versatile to allow quick implementation of new feature requests and other changes in business direction that necessitate changes in your app. This has been a particular asset during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has necessitated changes in business models and swift delivery of new features in mobile products in response to those shifts. 

How do you ensure your business gets the most out of its application?

There are some risks associated with React Native. An unskilled approach to the code could result in less than optimal app performance. It can perform more slowly than a native app, but the right developer will be able to configure a React Native app to perform comparably to a native one.

Scalability is another risk with React Native, and one that a startup especially will want to be wary of to avoid speed bumps at a time of accelerated growth. The community has responded to past scalability issues in React Native, but starting with a good foundation architecture is crucial to success.

While React Native is an excellent cross-platform framework, building for Android can be a heavier lift than for iOS. Having a team with experience in both will help prevent pitfalls.

As with any business investment, you need to be sure your team has the right skill set to provide something so crucial to the enterprise. Whether building an internal team or outsourcing development, onboarding a team with a deep bench in React Native is important to the success of your venture. 

Notch8 has been building in React Native almost since its introduction as a viable platform. Our React Native mobile clients have included growing companies with unique visions like Vizer and Scientist.com, and the youth-oriented nonprofit Moishe House. Contact Us to discuss your development needs. We’d be happy to talk through React Native and the right solutions for your business.

Upgrading Your App to Rails 6

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You may know Ruby on Rails 6 was released recently, but what does that mean for your Rails app?  Is it time for an upgrade?

Rails 6 was released in August 2019 and brings a lot of upgrades out of the box that offer improved performance, security, and additional feature options.

  • Parallel testing support reduces the time of running an entire test suite
  • Action Text utilizes Trix editor to bring WYSIWYG rich text content and editing to Rail
  • Support of multiple databases out of the box
  • Action Mailbox handles inbound email routing
  • Zeitwerk code loader 
  • In security, Host Authorization guards against DNS attacks by allowing only permitted hosts to access your application  

While Rails 6 allows your application to take advantage of these new features, it’s also important to understand when an upgrade is essential to ensure performance and uptime of your app.  Rails 4 or earlier is no longer supported, no longer receiving vital security patches.  Rails 5.0 is still receiving critical patches for now, but will be the next version to age out of support.  Releases Rails 5.2 and higher are still receiving regular security updates.

When undertaking any Rails upgrade, you’ll start by determining your current version of Ruby and Ruby on Rails – Rails 6 requires Ruby 2.5 or later (current stable is 2.7.1).  You’ll need to collect data about application code, test suite, gems, and dependencies. Planning an upgrade without interrupting performance of an app that’s currently in production is delicate, especially if app development will continue in parallel with an upgrade. 

Notch8 has built a business on Rails expertise for thirteen years, and we know even planning the roadmap to an upgrade is daunting. We offer Rails upgrade audits for $600, which provides an upgrade plan and highlights vulnerabilities. Our audit examines your code and dependent services, following a thorough process that:

  • Identifies any performance and scalability problems (load, memory leaks)
  • Identifies potential security risks
  • Evaluates database schema identifying any problems or deviations from the Rails conventions
  • Identifies problems migrating from earlier frameworks
  • Evaluates test coverage
  • Inspects dependent services, including databases and search services, and offers advice on upgrading those as needed
  • Provides feedback on coding style as it relates to “Rails Way” best practices
  • Checks the Github page for all gems to find out their compatibility with Rails 6.0

When the time comes, we’re also able to provide assistance in upgrading your app. If you decide to move forward with the upgrade, we will discount the price of the audit from the upgrade itself. Notch8 uses Docker to manage dependencies, and can also offer assistance in Dockerizing your application. Have questions or want to get started? We’ll be happy to set up a call!

Blending React into a Rails Project

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With the release of Rails 5.1 and the integration of webpack and yaml into rails all that is described here can be done much more simply using what is integrated into rail. That said, if you can’t upgrade yet or require serverside render the solutions below are still great options for you.

While the dawn of the large JS frontend app is long past and there is a new magical unicorn and pixi dust JS framework every time you turn around, there are still a lot of stock standard web apps out there. As a web consultancy, these apps have been our bread and butter for quite some time and there is no real need to change them. They just work.

But as things change, it would be nice to add some of the dynamic features of the new javascript hottness to our standard rails apps. Here are a few ways to integrate React into rails.

Notice: there is going to be a stupid amount of alliteration in this post. Fair warning. React rendering in Rails rendered radical web app.

React-Rails gem

I am starting here because this is the easiest way to get started with React on Rails. Per usual, just include the gem in your gem file gem react-rails, bundle install, and then run the install generator rails g react:install.

The reason I say this is it is fully integrated with sprockets and the current rails asset pipeline. if you already understand the asset pipeline and helper methods, then you’re good to go. Also, there is no dependacy on npm.

This is all you need to mount a React component to a spot on the page. That is this helper react_component.

<%= react_component("MyCoolWidget", prop1: "123", prop2: "abcd") %>

Other features include the ablitiy to render the components on the server for faster rendering and SEO, rendering a component as a view, and writing your components in ES2015 syntax or CoffeeScript.

One problem to note is that this doesn’t support a module system for JavaScript like Common-JS or ES6 imports. So, working with packages for React that do not have a version that does not export a useable variable is difficult.

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React Testing

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React Testing

Lets face it, testing is important but testing javascript UIs is not often straightforward.

Now for React. React is a excellent choice for your front-end view logic. I love React for how productive it makes me feel. However, one downside of the React ecosystem is that there are so many choices to make in terms of what tools you will use. Varying choices include Webpack, Browserify, ES6 and Babel to manage your state, business logic and request data. It requires a lot of sifting through. To make it easy, here is a set of good choices for testing React that have worked well for us.

Tools

  • Mocha & Chia

Mocha is a test runner that has been around for a good while. It provides describe() and it() functions for BDD style testing. It is reminiscent of Rspec in the Ruby world. Chia is often used with Mocha as it brings a whole host of assertions for whichever style of testing you like.

  • Chia

With Chia you have the options of using expect, should, and assert style assertions making it flexible for anyone’s taste.

  • Enzyme

Enzyme is a React component testing library from airbnb. It provides multiple, optimized ways to render React components and make assertions against them. Enzyme uses JSdom for some of its functionality and will be included as a dependency.

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Implementing a Bootstrap Theme

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After completing the development bootcamp, LEARN! in San Diego, and joining Notch8 as Interns, my team members and myself were tasked with creating a web app using a bootstrap template. We had worked on front end and had previously created web apps from the ground up in our group projects but we spent a full day browsing blogs and guides on how to best implement a template. Unfortunately, the guides we had found were not as straightforward as we would have liked. None offered a simple set of instructions of what to do and the rational behind it. So we created our own guide.
The most important aspect of web development to understand when using a bootstrap template is the asset pipeline. It is highly recommended that you familiarize yourself with this framework before attempting to use a template.
In simple terms, using a template requires that you copy all the images, scripts and css into the asset pipeline. Once this is done, you are free to use whatever you want from the html part of the template and take out what you don’t need. The following is a step by step guide on how to achieve this.

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Capabilities & Services

Notch8 has an experienced team of web developers distributed on the west coast of the U.S. available for: