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Comment by mcao | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome news. I've been working on a desktop application using React, node-webkit and browserify and it's been a great development experience. Being able to leverage web technologies to build native apps has been a huge time saver. However, I'm relying on the NodeJS components in order to do things like access the file system and fork commands. I'm wondering how React Native will handle this functionality. Will it be an extended API or can you only do AJAX calls? Either way it's very exciting.

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Currently working on something similar (minus browserify) -- I don't think React should try to get into the doing-everything game.

That said, their success (over something like node-webkit + react) will definitely depend on how well they match and integrate the native APIs.

Doing everything is a side effect of the architecture.

"The virtual dom is an implementation detail of React.js. React Native demonstrates that many rendering contexts are possible."

This was kind of the exciting point all along :). DOM just happens to be the output of a function that people are most interested in at the moment. but people have been talking about using it with canvas and other stuff, too. It's a generally-useful way to map functional data to render-trees.

Yep, I overlooked that fact, yeah that's awesome. I can imagine a world where people just come up with lots of mappings for the result, modularly. That's awesome

Native APIs are exposed as JS modules. And XHR, for example, is polyfilled in terms of whatever native capability exposed. You can totally use npm modules, provided any module that it uses is polyfilled.

Would you be willing to elaborate re my reply to colinramsay?

My bet is that they are working with thrift for their transport layer. We're moving the same direction. I should be landing a bunch of diffs over the next week to the JS thrift libraries to support XHR and websockets in the nodejs thrift library (for use with browserify).

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