You read it here first! Two days ago, Facebook unveiled the Android and iOS ports of their React framework, targeting native platforms using Javascript as a source language:
Joking aside, it looks like React Native has been in the works for a while and I don’t think my line of reasoning was particularly insightful. But I do think it is nice to see Javascript become a prime language for mobile applications and I think Facebook will be quickly followed at least by Google.
I also very much like that the Facebook engineering team isn’t setting cross-platform compatibility as a goal of the React project – as mentioned in the first part of the keynote, React is more concerned with promoting programming practices rather than with providing a full-blown multi-platform compatibility layer. ‘Write once, Run anywhere’ becomes ‘Learn once, Write anywhere’.
In any case, between Twitter’s Fabric, Facebook’s React and Google’s Polymer, the number of options to work with is growing, which is a Good Thing™ for developers, for the industry and ultimately for the users. Let’s hope it keeps Microsoft and Apple on the tip of their toes.