IDE for building React Native apps is now free and open source | Hacker News Reader

IDE for building React Native apps is now free and open source

decosoftware.com

202 pointssomecoder28 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11771697

Wow this is the best iterative development I've seen for iOS and easiest way I've seen to get started with React Native.

Enabling Hot Reloading (w/ Ctrl+D) lets you see changes as you type, you don't even need to hit Save. If this is a sign to come from React Native, it's going to be a game changer for both iterative development experience and code-reuse between iOS/Android.

My only concern is that I don't see how an IDE not developed in partnership with Facebook is going to succeed as I'd expect it to always be playing catchup with new features. Maybe it would've been better as a series of Atom plugin enhancements on top of Facebook's https://nuclide.io

> My only concern is that I don't see how an IDE not developed in partnership with Facebook is going to succeed as I'd expect it to always be playing catchup with new features.

New features for React Native are extensively discussed on the github repo and in the Facebook contributors' group before making it into a release. And at this point, a substantial minority of features are proposed, implemented and sometimes even merged by non-Facebook contributors. It takes a lot of work to stay on top of all the changes of course, but being developed outside of Facebook shouldn't make that process harder than it would be anyway.

Being an independent project is presumably going to have less dev resources than Facebook, as a non-official IDE they're also going to have a smaller ecosystem and not having direct access or influence with the core React Native development team is a disadvantage for Facebook tooling developers who would.

Whilst it's not impossible to compete with official tooling, they'll always be faced with a distinct disadvantage where they'd need to deliver a lot of added value in order to attract relevant mindshare.

yeah, dragging components from the component list and seeing them immediately reflected in the simulator with live-reload is freaking awesome.

So pretty soon we'll have cross platform UI development again, including eventually Mac and Windows once React Native is ported there. (Windows is I think already in beta somewhere.)

If we can bring in the web again via React Native for the Web (with 'widgets') then we can have UI "everywhere" with a mostly common code base.

I feel like eventually we are going to really converge. It's going to take a while before it's pretty and seamless and performant, but I feel like we'll eventually get there. The benefits are just too massive for it not to happen, especially for smaller projects that don't have a budget to have six dev teams maintain six UI code bases.

Why use an IDE focused on React Native vs a generalist one with React support?

"What is Deco? Deco is an IDE for React Native. It's an all-in-one solution for writing React Native apps that you can download and use without any environment setup. Deco improves the React Native development workflow by focusing on component reuse and enabling you to edit your UI in real time."

Many are starting to use GitHub as a registry for hosting packages, in this case Deco components[1].

GitHub should look into this, otherwise we get git repos with directories that are thousands in length.

Certainly it makes sense to host published code on GitHub as well as in-development code.

I could see it replacing the likes of NPM[2], Packagist[3], RubyGems[4], PyPI[5], etc.

[1] https://github.com/decosoftware/deco-components/tree/master/...

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/

[3] https://packagist.org/

[4] https://rubygems.org/

[5] https://pypi.python.org/pypi

>GitHub should look into this, otherwise we get git repos with directories that are thousands in length.

In a way, Github already looked into it extensively while helping resolve the issue where CocoaPods monopolized their servers and hit CPU rate-limiting. Whether it's abusive or not was already debated ad nauseum when it happened, but either way they came to a set of solutions which might help anyone else wanting to use Github for package management:

http://blog.cocoapods.org/Master-Spec-Repo-Rate-Limiting-Pos...

This could work. There wouldn't be a need anymore for linking to the Git repo in an NPM package or similar. Maybe a special branch with a simple JSON file containing package data in the same repo as the main project.

Versioning and indexing becomes an issue -- this has to be entirely and completely separate from git repos and git branches. Playing with branches like that falls apart pretty quickly when you need to add real features that are expected by package maintainers.

http://bower.io/ does this in a sense by watching releases on a repository.

Who here uses this? I'd love some real-world feedback on your experience. It looks awesome.

This looks awesome - even has pretty documentation!

Have run the tutorial without issue, took only a couple of minutes.

There seems to be only a small number of Components available out the box, with new ones accepted via PR.

This works fine for now, but it would be great if I could import my own Components or even build new ones within the UI.

I'd like to be able to "View Source" on a Component, it's obviously available via GitHub, but that's a few more clicks away.

Does anyone know of any similar IDE for desktop React?

Is it only for OS X?

From the readme [0], yep, only Mac is supported at this time

0: https://github.com/decosoftware/deco-ide/blob/master/README....

Yep. The GitHub readme says Windows and Linux are not supported at this time.

It seems to be built on electron (atom?) so it shouldn't be difficult to port to other platforms.

It uses the iOS simulator, so that's likely the hard bit to port.

Just noticed it doesn't provide the option for Android simulation, which would be more portable.

Is this only for React Native and not web React?

There is this new project which is asking, "If we're using flex-box layout for ios/android, why can't we write a compatability layer to put that same code on the web? " https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web

While commendable, I can't but laugh at the progression React Web -> React Native -> React Native for the Web

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how React and React Native relate. Are they similar enough that a React app can be modified to "go native" fairly easily? Like let's say you were building Slack which has web and desktop apps that appear identical. Could/would you use React/React-Native and this IDE?

From what I understand, you can't just "go native" from ReactJS because React Native uses specific components for mobile.

While you can't just port over, the way you think about components and your API endpoints can be re-used. It's also nice that they both work with components which allows for less "context switching."

They're using the same core library and conceptually work the same way but there's no no out-of-the-box unified widgets allowing you to share view code between both. So you can share your controllers, model, viewmodel, and higher order data binding components but you'll be rewriting your views.

Most of the logic can be the same. But the UI is different. For the web it uses html elements and for native uses native ios/android elements. Even android and ios are different. That's the biggest advantage if compared to Adobe Cordova. A lot more performant

It isn't about whether the underlying ui is different or not. Of course it is.

It is about whether the source application code can be the same. Today it isn't. But why not create a set of source compatible components that render to Android, iOS, and HTML?

I've seen projects approach this and I think it is a good idea. You get the typical lowest-common-denominator problem but if you have a decent way to mix in platform-specific elements where required, what is the downside?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com