Render all of your platform-specific UI elements on desktop from one JavaScript-based codebase using React Native for Windows.

As we know, React is a free and open-source JavaScript library written by Facebook to create highly dynamic web UIs. Facebook later created React Native for developing cross-platform native mobile apps by using React as the core interface for developers, which allowed them to build native mobile apps for Android and iOS with a single React syntax-based codebase.

React typically renders its component changes to DOM (Document Object Model), but it can also render components as HTML for server-side rendering (SSR) requirements. For React Native, there was Proton Native, which generated cross-platform desktop applications and let you render native UI elements with the Qt and wxWidgets UI toolkits, but which is no longer actively maintained.

While there is still an active fork of it, in this article, we’ll cover a more stable, actively maintained, and popular project: react-native-windows. This is Microsoft’s extension of React Native for Windows and macOS backends and makes it so that the same React Native-based frontend will natively render on Windows and macOS with platform-specific UI elements.

I will explain how you can develop Windows desktop applications using the react-native-windows project. We’ll also cover how your React Native syntax turns into a native desktop application with the framework’s internal modules.

#react-native #react #javascript #windows