Learning React Native

Chapter 9. Putting It All Together

Now that we’ve covered many of the pieces you’ll need to build your own React Native applications, let’s put everything together. Up until now, we’ve mostly dealt with small examples. In this chapter, we’ll look at the structure of a larger application. We’ll cover the use of Reflux, a library for unidirectional dataflow based on the Flux model. We’ll also see how we can use the Dimensions API to scale text to accommodate different screen sizes. Finally, we’ll end with some homework: tasks that you can undertake to see what it’s like to build out more features in an existing React Native codebase.

The Flashcard Application

Zebreto is a flashcard application based on the Spaced Repetition System (SRS), a learning strategy for effective memorization. With SRS, the goal is to review information just before you would otherwise forget it. If you do any foreign language study, you may be familiar with SRS systems; they allow you to memorize large amounts of data more quickly, focusing on long-term retention. A common approach is to start with a small interval between reviews, such as an hour, and to slowly scale up as you get cards correct: first an hour, then a day, then three days, then a week. Intervals can gradually increase to as much as a year, or five years. Tracking these intervals is impractical with pencil-and-paper flashcards, so we’ll build an app instead.

Zebreto is a bit more complex than the sample applications we’ve been building so ...