Navigating Through The React and React Native Diversity

The above title is meant to be a bit of a pun on the routing ecosystem around React and React Native. I also use the word diversity because one is characterized by a strong incumbent, and the other is plagued by rapid change.

Reactjs

The top dog in navigation libraries here is React Router. They have the benefit of several years of active development, along with an active community submitting PR’s, fixes, etc. It is also widely used and as a result, you end up with a well-supported, stable product.

React Native

This ecosystem is frontier territory in that various navigation libraries exist such as:

• NavigationExperimental. This is an updated navigator that has learned some lessons from Navigator, and has some solid integration with Redux.

The big issue with NavigationExperimental is that it is somewhat lightweight and doesn't include a lot of common navigation situations out of the box, like sidebars, tab bars, headers, etc. and one of the solutions that the community came up with has a really long tongue-twisting name:

• React Native Router Flux A personal favorite of mine, this is router is based upon NavigationExperimental. You can imagine that the authors looked at NavigationExperimental, realized that everyone would be writing the same wrapper code around it, and so created this project.

Like I said, React Native is frontier territory with navigation libraries and there are more developments to come.

By the way, I create video tutorials on Reactjs that will walk you through topics such as routing. Check it out here: MicroUrb