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  5. Java vs React Native

Java vs React Native

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Java
Java
Stacks148.0K
Followers105.5K
Votes3.7K
React Native
React Native
Stacks34.4K
Followers29.5K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars124.4K
Forks24.9K

Java vs React Native: What are the differences?

Java and React Native are popular technologies used for developing applications. While Java is a general-purpose programming language, React Native is a framework used for building native mobile applications using JavaScript. Here are the key differences between the two:

  1. Programming Paradigm: Java follows an object-oriented programming paradigm, where everything is treated as objects. On the other hand, React Native uses a component-based architecture, enabling developers to build reusable UI components.

  2. Platform Compatibility: Java is a versatile language that can be used to build applications for various platforms, including desktop, web, and mobile. In contrast, React Native is primarily used for developing mobile applications for both iOS and Android platforms.

  3. Development Speed: Java applications require more code to be written compared to React Native. In React Native, developers can leverage pre-built components, reducing the development time considerably.

  4. Native Performance: Java applications provide better performance as they run directly on the operating system, utilizing the device's resources efficiently. React Native, although fast, does have a performance gap compared to native applications as it relies on a bridge to communicate with the underlying operating system.

  5. Community Support and Resources: Java has been around for a long time and has a vast community with extensive resources available for developers. React Native, while gaining popularity, has a relatively smaller community, which means there may be fewer resources and community support available.

  6. Learning Curve: Java is a mature language and has a steeper learning curve with complex syntax and concepts. React Native, on the other hand, has a lower learning curve for developers with JavaScript knowledge, as it uses familiar concepts and syntax.

In summary, Java provides platform independence and better performance while React Native offers faster development speed, component reusability, and an easier learning curve for JavaScript developers.

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Advice on Java, React Native

Nick
Nick

Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 5, 2019

Review

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

176k views176k
Comments
Ido
Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k
Comments
Brent
Brent

CEO at DEFY Labs

Mar 7, 2020

Decided

Node.js has been growing in popularity, and the ability to access the global pool of Javascript developers is great. There is a decreased amount of effort for people to work across the frontend and backend, and the language itself is easy and works well for many common use cases.

Go was the other serious candidate, but it just hasn't been implemented in as many Production systems yet, and the best Go engineers I've known have been hackers, whereas we're building a robust analytics platform that requires more caution. Type safety is easily added with TypeScript, and NPM is awesomely handy.

369k views369k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Java
Java
React Native
React Native

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

-
Native iOS Components;Asynchronous Execution;Touch Handling;Flexbox and Styling; Polyfills
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
124.4K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
24.9K
Stacks
148.0K
Stacks
34.4K
Followers
105.5K
Followers
29.5K
Votes
3.7K
Votes
1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 608
    Great libraries
  • 446
    Widely used
  • 401
    Excellent tooling
  • 396
    Huge amount of documentation available
  • 334
    Large pool of developers available
Cons
  • 33
    Verbosity
  • 27
    NullpointerException
  • 17
    Nightmare to Write
  • 16
    Overcomplexity is praised in community culture
  • 12
    Boiler plate code
Pros
  • 214
    Learn once write everywhere
  • 174
    Cross platform
  • 169
    Javascript
  • 122
    Native ios components
  • 69
    Built by facebook
Cons
  • 23
    Javascript
  • 19
    Built by facebook
  • 12
    Cant use CSS
  • 4
    30 FPS Limit
  • 2
    Slow
Integrations
Spring
Spring
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Java, React Native?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Ionic

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

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