At Artsy, my team of long-time native developers, started using React Native on valentine’s day 2016 in our pre-existing iOS app. Overall it has been a net-positive for us. In short, the developer experience and ability to be productive is much better, we now are able to leverage the product engineering skills from devs that would previously only work on web projects, and our initial tests in porting our React Native iOS code to Android are looking promising.
I think there’s no binary answer to whether or not React Native is a viable option. I can definitely imagine a bunch of situations where that would not be the case, but in our case the app is largely just a collection of views that show remote JSON data. Some small animations are done using the React Native animations API, but e.g. our navigation completely relies on native APIs and also has custom native transitions.
In short, I think that the companies that will succeed with RN are those that have native experience and a can-do-self attitude, both to ensure proper platform UX and deal with lower-level details such as RN bugs and limitations that would prohibit the product design from being possible to implement at all (for instance, in our case nested scrollviews); or those that are willing to sacrifice on UX and product design. (Not making any judgements here btw.)
It's not simply that Xcode project files are edited that creeps me out. Cocoapods is actually trying to solve a complex problem, more so than other package managers like RubyGems or Pip or CPAN. Project files will therefore need to be edited.
It's really the fact that Xcode makes it inconvenient to do the work CocoaPods is trying to accomplish. I do trust you guys to do things right, I do not trust that Apple will keep your needs in mind when they make changes to Xcode.
There are features of CocoaPods that I just don't use, preferring to perform things manually. I don't use those features mostly due to the concerns described above, and my comfort level with doing them myself. If I did break my habits and use those features, the convenience might outweigh the complexity introduced.
I'd love to see Apple explicitly target CocoaPods compatibility as a beta testing goal.
Unfortunately this is a problem with most monolithic tools. The only sensible solution is to keep points of integration as minimal as possible so you can adapt when there are changes.
Minimalism combined with the fact that CocoaPods has a pretty large active community we should be able to adapt if large changes do occur.
Yes, CocoaPods can’t fix API breaking changes, but as we use semantic-versions and encourage authors to follow those, it can at least be mitigated more easily. E.g. A version requirement of: ‘~> 1’ should then install the latest v1.x.x, but not v2 which has API breakage.
Obviously this is not fool-proof and many are still getting used to it.
You assume that any code installed through CocoaPods will be created by ‘third-parties’, this is incorrect. Dependencies are simply that. You can use your own, like many companies have been doing successfully internally. E.g. http://dev.hubspot.com/blog/architecting-a-large-ios-app-wit...
Regarding “it’s not difficult” to do; Indeed it’s not, but it can be time consuming when you do want to quickly try out some libs. Especially once you have committed them to SCM and later on decide to remove them, because they weren’t what you wanted after all. This becomes even more a factor if you want to see a community that builds stuff together, instead of everybody re-inventing the wheel and/or vendoring their dependencies inside their lib leading to the mess that brings (at linker and runtime level), because then you need actual transitive dependencies and calculate a graph.
It is my experience that the lack of a tool and an ecosystem, such as CocoaPods, has led to the Objective-C OSS community staying minimal, in terms of working together. This can be noticed by the instant feedback people get on their projects when they release a library through CocoaPods and the decline of monolithic frameworks.
Whether or not your situation asks for this is another question. In consulting you’ll notice the benefit of quickly adding your dependencies, while on your own (single) product that’s probably a negligible amount of time. YMMV and all are fine.
It shouldn't be time consuming to manually integrate a dependency either. Add it to your project and go.
I further don't understand how it's a problem if you commit them to SCM and then decide to remove them. If you decide to remove them, then remove them, and you're back where you were.
Perhaps this is the gulf in understanding: when you talk about transitive dependencies, my immediate reaction is that if you have so many different dependencies and dependencies-on-dependencies that it becomes difficult to manage by hand, you're doing something terribly wrong and setting yourself up for a world of pain.
> It shouldn't be time consuming to manually integrate a dependency either. Add it to your project and go.
I’m not going to play the yes-no game with you on this.
> I further don't understand how it's a problem if you commit them to SCM and then decide to remove them. If you decide to remove them, then remove them, and you're back where you were.
You will have to spend time to figure out which build-settings originate from which library. Or you do it properly upfront with a xcconfig, which also costs you time.
> Perhaps this is the gulf in understanding: when you talk about transitive dependencies, my immediate reaction is that if you have so many different dependencies and dependencies-on-dependencies that it becomes difficult to manage by hand, you're doing something terribly wrong and setting yourself up for a world of pain.
I’m still planning to port that old blog post, by my then-colleague, to an iOS context and post it on our blog. This assumption you make is a common one and tends to leave sour tastes with everyone.
I don't understand your "build settings" comment. Why would there be any build settings originated from a library?
As for "making too many assumptions", it sure would be nice if you could, say, explain yourself instead of just saying I'm wrong and that my wrongness upsets people. Your FAQ link doesn't explain anything.
To explain my side: third-party code tends to be of low quality and interact with other third-party code in interesting ways. When things go wrong, and they always do even with the best programmers and the best code, the more bad third-party code you have, the more you have to dig through to find and fix the fault. This objection largely goes away if you only use dependencies of extremely high quality, but to be brutally honest, there aren't enough such projects out there to be able to make a mess from them.
> third-party code tends to be of low quality and interact with other third-party code in interesting ways.
Absolutely. There are less than a half dozen libraries I'll use without hesitation. The others get evaluated carefully on author, size, criticality, and my domain knowledge, with the default choice being: "no, don't want to deal".
But that's a criticism of all package managers everywhere, and I think it's clear that popular ones promote higher quality libraries, over time.
CocoaPods is young yet. Package management for compiled and linked executables might turn out to be too hard or wrongly marketed. But a strong ecosystem of third party Objective-C code is a laudable goal.
I don't really see how CocoaPods helps the ecosystem of third-party code or promotes higher quality libraries over time. The cost of using third-party libraries is high, so they need to be worth the cost if I'm going to use them at all, and the vast majority of that cost is not in the stuff that CocoaPods helps with.
> I don't understand your "build settings" comment. Why would there be any build settings originated from a library?
Your project might need to link against frameworks/libraries that the dependency requires. Your project might need certain search path. There are more, but I hope you understand what I mean now.
> As for "making too many assumptions", it sure would be nice if you could, say, explain yourself
> […]
> Your FAQ link doesn't explain anything
You hear “transitive dependencies” and you assume somebody is “doing something terribly wrong”. I’m saying that that’s not necessarily the case and in the FAQ item that I linked to I state that I’m against the scenario that you assumed.
The blog article that is linked to from that FAQ item goes into more detail about why it’s good to keep it to a bare minimum. (More on that below.)
> and that my wrongness upsets people
I wasn’t referring to you specifically, but rather to people on both sides (for/against) discussing this topic in general, which was the premise for me needing to ‘port’ that blog article. It was a side-node and I see how it could be taken the wrong way.
> To explain my side: third-party code tends to be of low quality and interact with other third-party code in interesting ways. When things go wrong, and they always do even with the best programmers and the best code, the more bad third-party code you have, the more you have to dig through to find and fix the fault. This objection largely goes away if you only use dependencies of extremely high quality
I already knew what you meant, this is not the first time I have this discussion :) But I should have been more explicit:
When we talk about dependencies that were created by a third-party, so _not_ dependencies per se, you are completely right and we are in full agreement. To quote from the blog post:
“Minimal dependency is not just about the number of libraries you use,
but also about the total amount of code you pull into your project.
Less code means less bugs.”
> but to be brutally honest, there aren't enough such projects out there to be able to make a mess from them
I doubt you checked all of them, but seeing as everyone makes mistakes in their own code, I think it’s fair to assume that there is a lot of code that could be improved.
Where we seem to differ, but tell me if I’m wrong, is that you in principle choose to not deal with any of them, probably because it wastes time (?). Whereas I prefer to choose a small one that does (almost) exactly what I need and (almost) is where I want it to be code-wise and then contribute to that project, instead of starting over.
To facilitate the mentality that I and many others have, it helps to have a tool and ecosystem that makes libs discoverable and ‘simple’ to build upon/together.
I don't refuse to use third-party libraries out of hand. If something is good, I'll use it. However, my assessment of the cost/benefit tradeoff differs from others. Take, for example, AFNetworking. It seems to be the gold standard for any iOS app that makes web calls, to the point where it's practically a default first step when making a new project for many programmers. Me, I don't understand the appeal. The cost is enormous due to adding a huge quantity of code (and therefore bugs) to your app, and the benefit over using what Apple provides is tiny.
If the cost/benefit tradeoff appears worthwhile, taking into account the large cost from adding any third-party code, I'm happy to make it. It just doesn't happen very often.
To me, CocoaPods doesn't move the needle on the cost/benefit tradeoff, because the cost of what CocoaPods handles is extremely small compared to the total. Thus why I don't really understand the point of it. It takes something that's infrequent and already easy, and makes it a little easier.
Agreed. CocoaPods might be useful if there were a lot of high quality library code out there that we could use, but right now, like Mike, I just don't see it.
The main use-case I can see for something like CocoaPods actually has to do with commercial library code---i.e. code that you purchase and for which you get proper support.
I'll also add this: CocoaPods, as it stands today, also creates a risk, in that it's possible that an updated version of some library you're depending on might have a different license---maybe one that's incompatible with the license for the software you're working on. As far as I can tell, CocoaPods has no mechanism to deal automatically with this issue, which makes its use in commercial projects dangerous IMO.
CocoaPods has been generating aggregated lists of licenses of libraries that you use in your app since a very long time, I don’t know of any other system that people use to pull-in dependencies that does this.
We also only accept libraries that specify a license. This has lead to many more licensing issues being clear than before people used CocoaPods.
We are, however, definitely not going to build in functionality that would give you the green or red light, because it’s impossible to do this right in an automated fashion. In the end, any licensing issue is your responsibility regardless, of how you pull the code in.
I agree, it’s too bad that people can’t just work for free as much as they would like on the stuff they love.
Now it is true that Laurent himself has not touched the repo since that email you linked to, but you know just as well as me that Watson has been doing maintenance work on MacRuby while on the payroll of RubyMotion (HipByte). His latest commit was 15 days ago and here’s a generalised diff of all the work done since the email: https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/compare/94c90b351c18ce1f5....
This is what people with limited time resources do, they delegate.
To conclude, when you’re out to paint someone black, you really should be more specific. As it stands, there are no lies in that email, which means that you are the one that is not telling the truth. I’m not sure why you want to spread FUD, but it’s quite obvious and really does not make you look professional.
PS: Whatever Apple chose or chooses to do has absolutely no relevancy to this at all. The moment they released it as Open-Source, they effectively said that people can do what they want as long as they follow the license.
Alloy my point was not about maintenance but the fact that MacRuby relies on the ObjC GC which is now deprecated.
In this email thread Laurent acknowledge the need to switch to static compilation and that he has a working branch he will soon merge.
This is exactly what RubyMotion just released and I'm saddened that it was not contributed back as promised.
Well, spoking of broken promises and people abandoning things, didn't you write a book on MacRuby and a couple of articles touting it, and then abandoned the project for greener pastures (Ruby, Go and such)?
What about the folks that bought into the book and MacRuby, thinking that it was a viable project, and then see you, one of the (few) main contributors abandon it -- and long before today's release of RubyMotion.
> This is kind of the opposite of the standard advice of "don't repeat yourself" and "don't reinvent the wheel". Both those pieces of advice make an awful lot of sense to me.
It’s not about re-implementing everything per project, it’s a reminder to think about all of the code you pull into your project.
We use some third-party gems, we have our own gems, but as a rule these should all provide the minimum necessary and not try to solve all higher-level use-cases. Because these types of libs, that do come with the proverbial kitchen-sink, tend to bring in functionality that you won’t be using but are still very much opportunities for bugs.
> You shouldn't have to be thinking about its inner workings. Some gems really can carry big risks with them.
Some might indeed carry big risks, which is why it’s good to know your code and that is made significantly easier with less code.
However, you should be thinking about their inner workings. Especially, but not limited to, open-source code which all (afaik) provide no warranty whatsoever. So when you pull it in, directly or indirectly, you are responsible.
I think there’s no binary answer to whether or not React Native is a viable option. I can definitely imagine a bunch of situations where that would not be the case, but in our case the app is largely just a collection of views that show remote JSON data. Some small animations are done using the React Native animations API, but e.g. our navigation completely relies on native APIs and also has custom native transitions.
In short, I think that the companies that will succeed with RN are those that have native experience and a can-do-self attitude, both to ensure proper platform UX and deal with lower-level details such as RN bugs and limitations that would prohibit the product design from being possible to implement at all (for instance, in our case nested scrollviews); or those that are willing to sacrifice on UX and product design. (Not making any judgements here btw.)
We’ve written a bunch about our experiences https://artsy.github.io/series/react-native-at-artsy/ and I recently spoke about our specific case of integrating RN into our existing native app at React Native EU https://github.com/alloy/react-native-eu.