Simplifying Cross-Platform Navigation with Solito
As a developer, you know how challenging it can be to share code across platforms, particularly when it comes to navigation. The web and mobile have different navigation patterns, making it difficult to reconcile these approaches. This is where Solito comes in – a library that combines different navigation approaches into a shared API, enabling a seamless experience for both web and mobile.
What is Solito?
Solito is a tiny wrapper around React Navigation and Next.js, allowing developers to share navigation code across platforms. It ensures a consistent navigation experience across different platforms, simplifying the codebase and reducing duplicated code. Solito runs in isolation between platforms, using React Navigation on Native and Next.js Router on Web.
Key Features of Solito
- Unified API for navigation
- Support for Next.js useRouter and Link
- Additional utilities like useParam
- Enables easy transition between React Native and Next.js
Setting up a Project with Solito
To demonstrate Solito’s capabilities, let’s build a simple news app using Solito and the Spaceflight News API. Our monorepo will include the following packages:
- Solito for cross-platform navigation
- Moti for animations
- Dripsy for theming/design
- Expo SDK 46
- Next.js 12
- React Navigation 6
Our folder structure will be opinionated, with separate folders for entry points, shared packages, and navigation-related code.
Creating a Home Screen
Let’s create a home screen that displays a list of news items using the
Creating a Detail Screen
Next, we’ll create a screen for displaying additional details about a news article. We’ll use Solito’s component and the useParam hook to read screen parameters.
Adding Screens for Web and Native
To add a screen as a Next.js page in Solito, we simply create a .tsx file inside the apps/next/pages directory and import the shared screen component. For native, we’ll add the screens in the navigation stack using the
Conclusion
Solito is a powerful tool for building cross-platform apps with Next.js and React Native. Its unified API for navigation enables a seamless experience across platforms, making it a must-have for any developer. With Solito, you can easily transition your React Native app into a Next.js site and vice versa without sacrificing the native navigation experience.