First conference in the world to focus on anything and everything React Native. No web, backend or general purpose talks. We've seen it already. Community, core contributors, insights, networking and tons of knowledge - that's all waiting for you in one of the most beautiful cities in Central Europe - Wroclaw.

There are lots of tricky things with React Native, partially because of iOS and Android ecosystems. There are lots of unanswered questions hanging around, or just people struggling to find answers for problems that may seem trivial to us. This conference is the place they can visit, get answers to questions and go home start writing their next cool startup. And that’s the real purpose of the conference.

React Native EU

React Native EU 2017, organized by Callstack.io, was the first conference in Europe focused exclusively on React Native. It took place on September 6-7 in Wroclaw, Poland.

Welcome to React Native EU 2017

Building libs is fun, but building apps is REALLY fun. Let's go over some of the best practices and ways we can build apps that fit your needs and your team!

Rapid React Native

React Native is much more than javascript. Every React Native app runs at least 4 different languages for the purpose of sharing code, implementing efficient subsystems, and interacting with the host system. 

We will look at how these systems work together and among other things learn how a javascript style object in your component gets translated into efficient C code in Yoga, the underlying layout engine.

React Native, The Native Bits

The history of UI programming is littered with frameworks that failed because they compromised user experience in favour of rapid development. As a technology, React Native has what it takes to avoid this fate, but it’s up to us to prove it by building delightful experiences that feel native to the platform. 

The question “does it feel native?” encompasses a breadth of topics: predictability, performance, gestures, motion, sensors, sound, and more. For those of us coming from web development, there’s a lot to learn. 

This talk explains what users really expect from our apps, and how we can use React Native to not only meet, but exceed their expectations.

When “Good Enough” - Just Isn’t Good Enough

There’s no shortage of web apps which let you quickly write some code and preview it instantly on the web without having to setup a development environment locally. Snack is provides the same seamless experience for React Native. In this talk we will dive deeper to see how Snack works under the hood, the challenges we faced while building it and what can use you use it for.

Building of Snack  The React Native Playground

Asynchronous rendering is one of the core principles of React. On the web, the ability to batch updates and work on a virtual DOM proved to be key factors in improving rendering performance. The same architecture seems to do miracles in React Native and gives JavaScript the performance boost needed to render native views effectively. This benefit of React Native is also its greatest drawback. 

For certain types of problems in native mobile, asynchronous rendering introduces an overhead that is almost impossible to bridge. List views are a good example, as even the best implementation to date, FlatList, struggles to keep up with the fill rate of the most naive list implementation in pure native. Is it possible to introduce synchronous rendering to React Native and tackle this category of problems from a different direction?

Going Over The Speed Limit  Synchronous Rendering in React Native

A great strength of React Native is how easily we can interface our app with native code. While working with React Native, I created a module (react-native-image-resizer) to resize local images using native APIs, integrated a native SDK to a React Native app and we added React Native to an existing native app. Let's see how to do this and how it's working internally!

Building native modules for React Native

At Badoo we have four main mobile teams: Android, iOS, Windows Phone (yes, for real!) and Mobile Web. When Mobile Web started adopting React in their projects, it was only a matter of time for us to ask ourselves: should we try React Native? And so we did! This is a short story of our journey with React Native: discovering it, adapting it, making things work and the most important part: convincing your managers that it's worth our time!

React Native and Badoo story of a massive experiment

Every now and again we need to integrate native code into our React Native app. First we create the iOS glue, the Android one and this repeats over and over again for every plugin. Wouldn’t it be great if there was something like react-native init ... for native plugins? I created react-native-create-library a while back and would like to present how it works, what it does and hope for some feedback to improve this CLI app.

Scaffolding plugins for React Native

React Native is great product but lacks for stable, intuitive and easy navigation API during many years. Every year we see new, better API: Native Navigator, ex-Navigator, NavigationExperimental, ex-Navigation, wix native navigation, airbnb native navigation, ReactNavigation… 

Once I've started React Native development, in 2015, I created RNRF - simple API for easy navigation. It was clear that better navigation instruments will come later but I didn't want to change my code again and again to switch for better API. 

Every new major version of RNRF is based on different navigation framework and mostly preserves own API. Another goal was to represent all navigation flow within one place in clear, human-readable way - similar to iOS Storyboards concept. This way other engineers could understand your app flow faster. 

I want to talk about latest version (v4) of RNRF based on ReactNavigation and MobX and provide best practices. New version provides not only navigation solution but also proposes a way to manage your app state.

What is RNRF (react-native-router-flux)?

Bringing Designer and Developer on the same repo with React Native Builder. Don't just prototype but code as a designer. Introducing the React Native Builder.

Introducing the React Native Builder

If your app is a hybrid of native and RN, you will probably rely on a lot on bridges to expose native behaviour to your JavaScript. Like any production code and especially for infrastructure code we want to test the bridges. In this talk we will show how we covered our bridges with automated tests.

How Skyscanner Tests RN Bridges on iOS

The declarative nature of React components is what makes it composable and attractive for UI development. React Native provides a way of using React for native development, but also introduces a couple of APIs for interacting with native modules, and these are not declarative. It is not always clear where to call these APIs from, and usually they end up in lifecycle hooks or redux middlewares in an unstructured style. In this talk we will see how Cycle.js (or in general, a hexagonal architecture) can help manage both React components and Native APIs in a declarative fashion, to organize code and make it more testable.

Composable Native APIs

Developing a good design website is an important skill, but let’s not forget that our code will be deployed in production environment and thousands will consume it. That may lead to a nightmare: you get a stack trace of a bug, but wait, it is minified and packed, you have no idea what this bug is or how to reproduce it. In this talk we will take Michael's rich experience in production environment and go from case to case to learn from other people’s mistakes.

React developer? Great! How are your production skills?

An introduction to writing React Native applications using ReasonML. Find out why ReasonML is great, why writing React Native with Reason is the jam, and learn how you can get started with it today!

Reasonable React Native

It's tempting to think that smooth and delightful UIs would also have beautiful, easy to read code. In all practicality, there are a number of gross hacks that React Native developers will utilize to implement slick user experiences. We will review the implementation of a photo viewer, and discuss the dirty hacks that were necessary to deliver a delightful user experience. Then we will look forward and see how the ecosystem can evolve to avoid the hacks without compromising on the resulting experience.

Practical hacks for delightful interactions

React Native was originally built to target only iOS and Android operating systems, but as popularity of react as well as the reactive paradigm grew in popularity and opened other doors to other platforms, projects such as React Primitives and React Native Web began to take shape. We are now also seeing other paradigms in the same space such as ReactXP, Weex, and Flutter begin to take shape. 

We will dive into each of these platforms and discuss how they work, what their APIs look like, how they differ from the traditional React Native platform, and how the future of cross platform development is evolving.

Cross Platform & Beyond

You’ve got an existing application and have come to the exciting conclusion that you want to adopt React Native. Rather than rewriting your full application at once, you may want to introduce it in an iterative fashion and without impeding progress for developers that are continuing to work on the existing codebase in the interim. But where and how to start? 

This talk will focus on _why_ at Artsy we came to the conclusion to use React Native and provide practical examples on _how_ we integrated it into our existing Objective-C/Swift codebase.

Integrating React Native into an existing native codebase

How do engineers at Facebook build products with React Native? We'll walk you through building a simple screen in the Facebook app with React Native on both platforms, covering some GraphQL in the process. 

We'll discuss the collaboration between engineers and designers. We'll also cover A/B testing which is a crucial part of shipping most code at Facebook. The talk has practical examples taken from a project Martin worked on.

Building a Product with React Native

React Native provides us with a set of primitives for building mobile applications. A few of these can be aggregated into a "networking" layer that manages the transfer of data. This layer was designed to mimic an API we have in the Web, but despite all the similarities, it has its own *qualities* and caveats every good React Native developer should know about. 

In this talk I'll try to guide you through the networking layer in React Native and share some tips and tricks I've learned along the way.

Network layer in React Native

Physical Web taking the world by a storm. More and more applications interact with physical devices using Beacons and low energy bluetooth. In this talk I will cover how to interact with physical world from inside React Native application.

Getting into Physical web with React of Things

React Native is great for developing large applications across multiple teams, but only if you architect your app well. See the code and architecture that allows us to have disconnected teams working on separate modules but delivering a cohesive product that users feel is just one unified app. How many developers do you have working on your React Native app? One? Less than five? 15? What if you had over 40? 

React Native is a good fit for developing large applications across multiple teams in a company, but only if you architect your app correctly. Less than two years ago, I could count all of the developers working on our app on one hand. Now, I don’t even know everyone’s names. Learn how we architected the Wix app in a way that allows us to have multiple teams on multiple continents working on separate modules but delivering a cohesive product that users feel is just one unified app.

Scaling Mobile Development with React Native

This talk will present the concepts of Offline first applications, Optimistic UI Updates, “Transaction management” in redux. Humanly speaking, I will explain how your app should behave in our always kinda connected world (kinda, because you loose the network in the Subway, in your bathroom or in the elevator) to avoid frustrating your users, let them use your application even when they don’t have network and access data loaded in a previous session when they need it most (you know, when you have 1% battery left and turned on Airplane mode to keep your phone going just for the time to come home or find a plug somewhere). I will present some code examples of using awesome libraries to do that easily and talk about the local storage alternatives (AsyncStorage, SQLite and Realm) available to React Native.

Offline first applications in React Native done well

What if I told you that accepting payments in mobile apps could be easy and that you could use a single API to accept payments across three different platforms? In this talk, we’ll learn about the Payment Request API, a new W3C standard that dramatically simplifies accepting payments on the web, and how we can use React Native Payments to leverage it in our mobile apps.

React Native Payments  Bringing the Payment Request API to React Native

Coming from the web world, building iOS and Android apps are a pain.It takes time, there are a ton of different tools or services to use and jump between to get to the end point and it is just a loss of time that could be used to fix that weird UI element you did not have the time to finish, or that code that hasn’t been tested but really should be. 

Thankfully, fastlane is here to help us and makes it incredibly easy to automate Android and iOS builds, deployment, screenshots and far more. This talk will present how to get started and build and deploy a React-native project to Testflight (iOS) and the Android Play store beta track and will present in more details a subset of the tools provided by fastlane.

Automate your React Native world with fastlane

React Native EU 2017 Q&A session with Tal Kol (Wix), Eric Vicenti (Facebook), Andre Staltz and Ville Immonen (Reindex).

Q&A Session

React Native EU 2017 - Thank you!

React Native EU backstage interviews with Eloy Durán (Artsy), Ken Wheeler (Formidable Labs), Martin Konicek, Tal Kol (Wix), Naoufal Kadhom (Netflix) & Mike Grabowski (Callstack).

Backstage Interviews

React Native EU 2017 conference took place on September 6-7th in Wroclaw, Poland, as the first conference in Europe focused exclusively on React Native. It was preceded by two-day workshops session.

The conference has gathered numerous highly acclaimed speakers & React Native community leaders from all over the world and was very well received by the attendees as well as the community.