Facebook hosted February’s London React.js User Group Meetup featuring talks from Guy Nesher from Conversocial entitled ‘An Introduction to Flux‘, Robbie McCorkell of Red Badger with ‘A Preview of React Native’ and a couple of lightening talks.. ‘React Powered Playlists’ for Parties by Rui Ramos and ‘Application Layout for React’ by Steve Heron.
Bizarrely for him, Robbie McCorkell gives a talk on Facebook’s React Native (go to 37:15) which he says, “..has not been released yet, in Facebook’s office (London) and I’ve had nothing to do with whatsoever and I even think I might have seen people that work on React in the audience, or at least collecting pizza.. but hey, I’m not complaining!”
McCorkell returned from ReactConf fired up about React Native after listening to the talks in San Francisco and gives a good explanation into exactly what React Native is and it’s main features with reference to Tom Occhino’s Introducing React Native talk and A Deep Dive into React Native by Christopher Chedeau.
As part of going to ReactConf, McCorkell got the pre-release React Native code and in this talk goes through the steps of building a normal native app (go to 41:13) before using the pre-release and demo-ing with React Native and attempts to address some of the questions which he still had about it when he returned to London.
With Flux, Conversocial have been using it for about six months and Nesher’s talk beforehand centred on what they have got out of Flux and why it has been a success for them so far whilst also explaining what makes MVC web applications complicated.
Running through an element of the Conversocial application Nesher explained the cascading effect which makes it harder to render content at a reasonable pace as application grow, “The Flux architecture tries to change that by introducing a uni-directional data flow. We have started writing our applications and conversations with Flux.. with Flux we simply reduce the number of updates needed quite drastically” and Nesher goes on to describe in technical details how they have adopted it.
