Hotwire Native for Rails Developers (Pragmatic Bookshelf)

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Joe Masilotti @joemasilotti

edited by Nicole Taché @ntache

Create intuitive and maintainable mobile apps powered by the technology you already know, Ruby on Rails. Add Hotwire Native to your new or existing Rails app and start creating native iOS and Android applications. You’ll learn how to enhance your apps, progressively adding native components and screens. Bring your existing or new web apps to a much wider mobile audience, and make the app look and feel native to their platform.

You know how to create a great web app using Rails. But how do you also create native apps for iOS and Android when you don’t want to reimplement everything in Swift and Kotlin? Fully native iOS and Android apps are expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain. And, of course, you have to deal with the app stores.

Hotwire Native builds hybrid mobile apps by rendering HTML directly from your Rails server. Build your screens once and deploy across web, iOS, and Android simultaneously. No repackaging apps or resubmitting to app stores.

You’ll build a hiking tracker app on iOS and Android. Start by creating a bare-bones app and build new features into it with each new chapter. Set up remote path configuration to navigate gracefully and route forms efficiently. Determine when it makes sense to upgrade your screens to native. Build native components and screens to enhance the apps progressively, with full access to iOS and Android SDKs and APIs, such as push notifications and native maps. And deploy to physical devices for beta testing.

You’ll drive the content and behavior of your apps directly from the server, without changing any native code. And you’ll keep your business logic in one place, making your apps more resilient to future changes and easier to maintain. Along the way, you’ll learn just enough Swift and Kotlin to confidently build functional, user-friendly mobile apps.

Joe Masilotti is a Hotwire Native developer and consultant who is on a mission to make mobile app development easier for Rails developers. He’s been working with Hotwire Native since 2016 and is a maintainer of the library. Since then, he’s helped dozens of businesses bring their Rails apps to the app stores.

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