jayming111/reapp

Reapp - next gen hybrid apps

What is it?

Reapp is everything you need to build amazing hybrid apps with React: a collection of modules that work together, a UI kit, and our CLI that bootstraps your app and has a pre-configured build server.

Help

Examples

We have two example apps you can check the source to:

• Kitchen Sink (demo)
• Hacker News Reader (demo)

Installation

Installation is done through npm, though you can pick and choose any pieces you'd like and roll your own stack. To get the reapp CLI:

npm install -g reapp

Once that's done you can generate a new base reapp stack with:

reapp new [name]

Where [name] is the name you'd like to give your new stack.

CLI

The CLI has two main functions that it helps you with. The first is creating new apps. For now, it simply makes a bare clone of a repo we keep updated with the current best-practice. The goal is eventually to have a variety of baseline repo's to choose from.

It also lets you run your app, using reapp-server, a simple express server that works well with the default app structure.

CLI Usage:

Usage: reapp [command]

  new [name]  creates a directory with a new reapp-starter scaffold
  run         runs a reapp application with express/webpack-dev-server
  build       builds a reapp application to a bundle in ./build
  debug       use this to for opening issues!
  help [cmd]  display help for [cmd]

The build and run commands take a variety of options to help ease your development, such as:

Usage: reapp-run [options]

  -h, --help           output usage information
  -d, --debug          output extra information for debugging
  -p, --port [number]  specify a port [number]
  -h, --host [host]    specify hostname
  -e, --env [env]      specify an enivornment
  -t, --tool [tool]    specify a webpack devtool

Usage: reapp-build [options]

  -h, --help   output usage information
  -w, --watch  watch for changes
  -d, --debug  output extra information for debugging
  --no-assets  only build the js
  --no-js      only build the assets

Running & Building Reapp

The run command has a few options to help you out. You can do:

• reapp run -d (debug) to output information on how it's running your app
• reapp run -e production (env=production) to run your app in production mode, which is much faster
• reapp run -t source-map (tool=source-map) to have full sourcemaps rather than the "eval" style sourcemaps we default to

You also have the same flags available as the run commands.

The build command is used once you're ready to deploy your app (to either the web or to cordova). For now, we provide two types of builds:

• reapp build targets the web for mobile sites.
• reapp build ios targets cordova ios devices.

See more on custom builds.

When you run reapp build you'll notice a new ./build folder where your assets have been copied to. We're working on adding more documentation soon on how to get those assets into a Cordova/Phonegap app.

Structure of your applications

You can see the exact app that's generated through the reapp-starter repo. Only the /app/app.js entrypoint and /assets/layout.html is "necessary". In the future, we could have a config file to make this completely custom. For now, it's very simple:

/app
  /components
  /theme
  app.js
  routes.js
/assets
  layout.html
/config (optional)

/app/app.js is your entry point. Everything in the app folder should be pretty self-explanatory. /assets contains static assets, with a layout.html that is used to serve your app within. In general, you should't have to touch the layout, even for adding styles.

The /theme folder is reapp-ui specific. You can find docs for it in the repo, but it also should be pretty easy to understand.

If you place a build.webpack.js or run.webpack.js in your /config dir, the reapp CLI will use these configs when you run reapp build or reapp run. To see some example configs, check out the files in the ./config folder of the reapp-pack repo.

Your First App

There are a number of pieces we've included in a reapp. Let's explore a few of them in order of when you'll encounter them in your codebase. Think of this as a tour of a reapp app, giving an introduction to packages as we encounter them.

You can check out the reapp project on Github for more info.

To start, you'll want to open ./package.json. Notice we have the following packages:

• reapp-routes (Routes generator)
• reapp-ui (UI Kit)
• reapp (CLI)
• reapp-platform (Base utils)
• reapp-component (DI and Factories)

You also have an entry point defined as app/app.js. This starts your app. The most important part here is the routing. Lets start there.

reapp-routes (Routes generator)

reapp-routes is a DRY nested route-to-directory mapping system. As long as your routes map to your component file structure, you can save lots of time and enforce consistency in your app, a win-win.

Notice how the import looks for reapp-routes/react-router. The first import in app.js is your router. We love react-router, so we included a reapp-routes generator for that by default, but you could write your own.

You'll notice that the pre-defined routes all perfectly map to the structure of ./app/components. To see more about how this works, check out reapp-routes.

This is the reapp-routes syntax. The key to note here is the require that is passed to the routes function at the top level, which is how it dynamically requires your components based on the route tree.

reapp-ui (UI Kit)

The next theme we require is the ./app/theme.js file. reapp-ui has it's own documentation, but themes are the core of reapp-ui. They have three things they need: constants, styles, and animations. You can just use the included iOS theme, but we've included the ./app/theme folder as an example of how you can easily customize themes.

More reading

• reapp (CLI)
• reapp-platform (Base utils)
• reapp-component (DI and Factories)

Custom builds

Reapp-pack takes in an object that lets you configure your builds. To read more on the options that takes, see the reapp-pack readme.

Reapp will automatically look for your build files, and you can override the defaults if you'd like. If you don't have a config folder, it will just use the defaults.

The way it looks for config files:

• reapp run looks for:

  • ./config/run.config.js
  • reapp-pack/config/run.js

• reapp build looks for:

  • ./config/build.config.js
  • reapp-pack/config/build.js

• reapp build [platform] looks for:

  • ./config/build.[platform].config.js
  • reapp-pack/config/build.[platform].js

Why Reapp?

Reapp wasn't built purposefully to be a framework. Instead, it started as a UI kit. From that kit, two apps were built. While this isn't a lot, it was enough to see repetition between the two that could be extracted.

From those two apps, over a period of months, we extracted a set of packages, ensuring to keep each of them completely independent. It was an experiment in seeing if a framework was necessary.

What we found was this: if you can subscribe to a certain file structure, you can avoid the framework. With that file structure, we can provide helpers via a CLI. Bootstrap your app in one command and you have a mature build system built in, without having to do anything.

Really, Reapp is simple. You could even just use the UI kit and roll your own app. We just went through that headache, and decided to make it easier to avoid it if you like how we make apps.

Roadmap

Our initial goals are simple: focus on completeness, consistency, and performance. Also, a theme for Android.

Down the road we'd like to achieve the following:

• Isomorphic - Render first on server, pass data over to client to continue from there (easily achievable).
• Responsive - Support for tablet style interfaces and JS-powered responsive styling.
• Physics - A spring based physics library into the animation library with an easy syntax.
• Interaction - A simple, declarative interaction library that can be composed well with reapp

Development Environment

Sublime users, here's a guide for getting syntax highlighting, snippets and linting that works with babel.