14 DAY TRIAL // At this year's F8 Developer Conference that takes place in San Francisco, California, Facebook's top devs announced new features for the company's React Native framework, more exactly, support for the Tizen and Windows platforms.
React Native is a tool that started out as a side-project to a previous Facebook side-project, React.js
After Facebook released an in-house project called React.js, the minimalistic JavaScript framework gained a massive following in the open source community, who, to the surprise of Facebook's devs, started using it for more than SPAs (Single Page Apps) and, slowly but surely, began using it in their mobile apps as well.
React Native started with iOS support, expanded to Android
Facebook saw this trend, and as part of an internal hackathon in the summer of 2013, the first version of what would soon be React Native emerged.
The project's first public preview came two years later, in January 2015, when Facebook's devs offered a short glimpse of React Native at React.js Conf.
The official launch soon followed in May 2015, at last year's F8 conference, when the company also open-sourced React Native, providing developers with a tool that lets them build mobile apps in JavaScript, and later compiles it to native mobile code.
Initial support included only the iOS platform (JS-to-ObjectiveC), but Android support came in September 2015, a release that helped the platform gain even more popularity.
React Native is about to receive UWP support
Facebook didn't stand still, though, and together with CodePush (for the Windows port) and Samsung's developer teams, it has continued to work on the project, announcing today official plans to support React Native as an app building environment for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Tizen OS applications.
This means that you'll be able to write JavaScript code and then compile to run seamlessly on Windows 10 desktops, Windows 10 Phone, Xbox One, HoloLens, Samsung smart TVs, and smartwatches.
These React Native ports are not yet ready, and Facebook says that Windows support is around 80 percent while the Samsung Tizen port is currently unknown, in its initial phases. Once projects reach a stable status, they'll be merged inside the main React Native code.
