Seasoned Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile SDK dev here. Looks like that a lot of people here is comparing this announcement from the react team to the Titanium Mobile SDK. I’d like to give some info to shed some light on the differences, and probably anticipate the challenges they have to (or had to) solve.
## Architecture
Both Titanium SDK and this Native React thing do have a JavaScript runtime behind the curtains.
Both frameworks will run the JS runtime on the background, on a different thread from the UI. This is incredibly important to remind.
Titanium SDK follows an OOP-ish, imperative approach. You create views using factories (`Titanium.UI.createScrollView({ })`) and you add those views to parent views (`parent.add(child)`). This is very similar to a browser DOM, and in fact it’s cumbersome to work with. They built an xml preprocessor called Alloy which does a better job at exposing the view hierarchy right in the source, but it just compiles down to JS, `create()` and `add()`.
This is important for the evaluation at least for the following reason: every time you update a property on a view (actually on a proxy object to the real view) you’re crossing the bridge and you have to pay that penality. The bridge is the void between the JS runtime’s thread and the main, UI’s one. This is incredibly painful when trying to do JS animations, sometimes if you’re not careful you can get hurt very badly. You can still do great things, but it’s way better to use the native `.animate()` methods, which cross the bridge only twice (at start, and at the end as a callback invoking).
On Native React you should not have this kind of problems because changes will be batched and updated on a update loop basis or at least debounced. Or at least optimized in some smart way. I believe.
## Layout
One big problem will be the layout. Given that they don’t want the developers to understand every layout system every platform provides, they have to normalize it somehow.
Titanium SDK has it’s own layout system, incredibly easy to understand even from a web-only dev experience:
a) by default everything is absolute positioned,
b) you can get a vertical flow layout by setting the 'layout' property on the parent view or
c) you can get a horizontal flow (inline-block-ish) by setting 'layout' to horizontal.
Native React will probably follow a more intimately web-ish approach, just look at this JS/C/Java implementation of the box-model and flex-box specification by Facebook itself [1]
Titanium SDK is always criticized for being to limited in what you can do with it. This actually comes from two different issues:
1) they have to (almost) manually implement every API you might need, by proxying from native-land to JS-land;
2) they have to follow every release of the platform’s SDK;
3) you cannot just put native code along-side your JS code, so you cannot go where they didn’t.
Let’s see how Native React will solve this issue.
Titanium SDK is undergoing an heavy lifting refactoring to solve exactly this issues. The project is code-named Hyperloop and is already working behind the curtains for the Windows 8 version of the SDK.
## Conclusion
Because I shamelessy want to karma-drift this topic, I’ll stop here.
It’s interesting, but until they show us some (native) code... it’s just ideas.
Follow me on twitter (@_pier) and github (@yuchi) for Titanium related stuff.
Also my company, SMC, does a lot of great opensource things for Titanium (on gh we’re @smclab)
Titanium comparisons are some of my top thoughts too.
1) How do they access the native API?
If there's no abstraction, just a translation, then the apps must be different for each platform. If there is an abstraction, then how much of the native platform do they cover? It can't be 100%, and the native APIs change with every OS version. Basic calls are easy, integrating things like device keychain, intents, and services are not so easy -- we learned this with Titanium.
2) How will React Native do cross-platform local data storage?
Being able to easily import, retain, and sync remote data is an absolute need for today's apps. Titanium uses SQLite on both sides, and has modules for more (like TiTouchDB). Not abstracting data storage would be a major mistake IMHO.
3) Can we use standard npm modules?
JS's killer feature is the module ecosystem, it's no good having a JS engine if we have to reinvent common modules to match a new API. V8 is the gold standard here, fingers crossed.
4) Debugging?
Speaks for itself. Debugging both JS and native code together bridged from a device is hard. Hopefully they are adapting existing tools and IDEs like node-inspector and Sublime Text.
Exactly. As Haynie stated on tw, it’s sad that they didn’t included them in the design process. They already solved a lot of challenges.
BTW, did you have a look at titaniumifier? (https://github.com/smclab/titaniumifier) it’s a tool we built to port node packages to titanium (a declination of browserify, actually).
## Architecture
Both Titanium SDK and this Native React thing do have a JavaScript runtime behind the curtains.
Both frameworks will run the JS runtime on the background, on a different thread from the UI. This is incredibly important to remind.
Titanium SDK follows an OOP-ish, imperative approach. You create views using factories (`Titanium.UI.createScrollView({ })`) and you add those views to parent views (`parent.add(child)`). This is very similar to a browser DOM, and in fact it’s cumbersome to work with. They built an xml preprocessor called Alloy which does a better job at exposing the view hierarchy right in the source, but it just compiles down to JS, `create()` and `add()`.
This is important for the evaluation at least for the following reason: every time you update a property on a view (actually on a proxy object to the real view) you’re crossing the bridge and you have to pay that penality. The bridge is the void between the JS runtime’s thread and the main, UI’s one. This is incredibly painful when trying to do JS animations, sometimes if you’re not careful you can get hurt very badly. You can still do great things, but it’s way better to use the native `.animate()` methods, which cross the bridge only twice (at start, and at the end as a callback invoking).
On Native React you should not have this kind of problems because changes will be batched and updated on a update loop basis or at least debounced. Or at least optimized in some smart way. I believe.
## Layout
One big problem will be the layout. Given that they don’t want the developers to understand every layout system every platform provides, they have to normalize it somehow. Titanium SDK has it’s own layout system, incredibly easy to understand even from a web-only dev experience:
a) by default everything is absolute positioned,
b) you can get a vertical flow layout by setting the 'layout' property on the parent view or
c) you can get a horizontal flow (inline-block-ish) by setting 'layout' to horizontal.
Native React will probably follow a more intimately web-ish approach, just look at this JS/C/Java implementation of the box-model and flex-box specification by Facebook itself [1]
[1]: https://github.com/facebook/css-layout
## Support and limits
Titanium SDK is always criticized for being to limited in what you can do with it. This actually comes from two different issues:
1) they have to (almost) manually implement every API you might need, by proxying from native-land to JS-land;
2) they have to follow every release of the platform’s SDK;
3) you cannot just put native code along-side your JS code, so you cannot go where they didn’t.
Let’s see how Native React will solve this issue.
Titanium SDK is undergoing an heavy lifting refactoring to solve exactly this issues. The project is code-named Hyperloop and is already working behind the curtains for the Windows 8 version of the SDK.
## Conclusion
Because I shamelessy want to karma-drift this topic, I’ll stop here.
It’s interesting, but until they show us some (native) code... it’s just ideas.
Follow me on twitter (@_pier) and github (@yuchi) for Titanium related stuff.
Also my company, SMC, does a lot of great opensource things for Titanium (on gh we’re @smclab)