JavaScript <-> Native communication

Because the code of your MiniApps written in JavaScript will be executing inside a JavaScript virtual machine in the mobile application, they don't have direct access to your mobile application data, nor can they invoke any methods in the mobile application. The same is true the other way arround.

React Native offers communication between the JavaScript side and the Native side through its internal bridge, mostly surfaced to the developpers trhough Native Modules.

Electrode React Native, in addition to allow you to reuse existing React Native Native Modules, comes with its own bridge (which is actually nothing more than a Native Module), built on top of exiting communication constructs offered by React Native out of the box.

Electrode React Native bridge offers bi-directional type safe communication, exposed as events and requests/responses constructs, and can be used directly in your mobile application or MiniApp to help communication between the two sides; however, using Electrode React Native, you will mostly not interact directly with the bridge, but rather with what we call APIs.

Electrode React Native APIs are in some sense equivalent to React Native Native Modules.
As for Native Modules, you can create your own APIs and distribute them, or re-use existing ones.

While you can create new Native Modules and use them with Electrode React Native, this is not the recommended approach. Indeed, you'll want to create APIs instead as they are well integrated with the platform and offer a few advantages compared to native modules when it comes to working with the platform :

• APIs are fully generated. Just define the interactions it will offers, as a Swagger schema, in terms of events and requests and the necessary API client code, and implementation support code, will be generated for JavaScript/iOS and Android.

• APIs also support the generation of model classes. Just define your models in your Swagger schema and the necessary classes will be generated. Relying on Electrode React Native bridge support, this means that on the mobile application side, developers will be able to work with real models, and will be able to properly leverage their compilation time checks when dealing with APIs.

• APIs decouple the client code of the API from its implementation. You are free to implement the API on the native side or the JavaScript side. Because of this decoupling, it is also possible to write multiple implementations for a single API.

• APIs are not Native Modules. They are clients of the Electrode React Native bridge which is the Native Module. In that sense, there is no "linking" required for APIs.

• APIs are generated and therefore will all follow the exact same file system structure. This means that they don't need any specific configuration to be written for Electrode React Native to properly add them to a container.

• APIs are expected to follow a certain versioning convention, offering more flexibility it terms of compatibility checks between different versions.