6 ms·

Native UIs using Vue.js and NativeScript

125 points by lobo_tuerto 9y ago

saagarjha 9y ago
I'm not quite impressed with the images I found online[1]. Does anyone have an example of a well-written that looks native using this? [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nativescript+vue&t=hf&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nativescript+vue&t=hf&iax=images&i...
- sect2k 9y ago
  https://www.nativescript.org/showcases https://www.nativescript.org/showcases This is a showcase for NativeScript in general, but AFAIK what you can do with NS, you can do with NS+Vue. The one thing I really like about NS is that it give you full access to native platform APIs in JavaScript.
pavlov 9y ago
Seems to be like React Native except with Vue instead?
- k__ 9y ago
  RN probably integrates better with React than NativeScript with Vue. You can also use Angular with NS, which workes much different than Vue.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    Weex is another RN equivalent for Vue: https://weex.incubator.apache.org/ https://weex.incubator.apache.org/ Not nearly as mature as RN though.
    - deadcoder0904 9y ago
      Weex is adopted well in the Chinese Community. From what I hear, its used in Alibaba (E Commerce site of China like Amazon) products. Its mature but you won't find well-written docs in English.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kyriakos 9y ago
Still has the same single thread limitations of react native?
- thebigspacefuck 9y ago
  The UI and JS run on the same thread, but you can offload some work to worker threads: https://docs.nativescript.org/angular/core-concepts/multithreading-model https://docs.nativescript.org/angular/core-concepts/multithr...
jeswin 9y ago
Apps running inside a JS vm on iOS or Android are not "truly native". Misappropriating an existing term (native app) to include such a design is uninviting; not even necessary. There are so many ways in which this is inferior to native code. And I say this as someone who works primarily with JavaScript.
- Mayzie 9y ago
  To be fair, "native" in this sense is exposing platform native UI components and libraries, which gives apps a native look and feel because, well, they _are_ native. For most apps that's all you'll ever need, and the performance overheard of running JS is negligible. For any performance critical code, you can write them in the platforms native code and interface with them via JavaScript. Unfortunately though, so many developers do not know how to write in the platforms preferred native language and you end up with components, like most of those listed on awesome-react-native[1], where they're entirely written in JS which: * sometimes emulate the native look and feel (often poorly), not _are_ the look and feel, and, * as a result, often perform super poorly compared to their native counterparts, and, * if emulating the native look and feel, and not implementing their own design/UI (which most do), that look and feel can break between OS upgrades and feel out of place, and, * often don't distinguish between platforms (i.e. the developer won't bother implementing the look and feel for Android, where the component is entirely compatible). [1] - https://github.com/jondot/awesome-react-native https://github.com/jondot/awesome-react-native
  - benjaminl 9y ago
    To be truly fair the claim is "truly native", not just "native". If the claim was, native GUI, that would work, but "truly native" is a huge stretch. These apps are about as native as the Java based Eclipse IDE whose SWT based UI uses native GUI elements for display.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    My experience with React Native was that it doesn't consistently use native UI components, it uses UIViews that people have cobbled together into their own replications of varying quality. So if you want a big grid of items, you're not using a UICollectionView, you're reimplementing it yourself or finding someone else's attempt at that. Maybe this is because a UICollectionView doesn't have an identical counterpart on Android so it's easier to just redo it from scratch? But I'd be surprised if the performance of these things is as good as the real native ones, even if they make it out of UIViews. My other big complaint is that it doesn't help you with UI size classes. iOS apps change their layout depending on (generally) whether you're on an iPad (fullscreen / large split), or iPhone (and iPad small split, which is iPhone sized but much taller). The two weird exceptions being the iPad Pro having two full sized splits, and the Plus sized phones acting sort of iPad-like in landscape view. Anyone have an example of a React Native app that follows those conventions correctly? Last I checked the Facebook app (which I assume is something of a canonical example) doesn't even support split screen, and iOS 9 came out in 2015. This was a year or so ago that I was poking around at it, things may have improved since then?
sumedh 9y ago
> Sample apps: We’re looking for people to put this plugin through its paces and send feedback our way. Maybe they should build some sample apps before telling others to use the framework.
gremlinsinc 9y ago
Looks pretty sweet, I've been wanting a React Native like stack but with Vue as I much prefer working in Vue over React personally. I'll definitely have to try this out.
jaequery 9y ago
this is amazing! native script is just superior to react native in so many ways, always wanted to try but now that its paired with vue i may just jump head in! from what i hear, native script is more native than react native, 100% cross platform from ios and android, and much more performant than React Native. i can see this becoming a real contender very soon.
- pka 9y ago
  > native script is just superior to react native in so many ways Could you elaborate? If true that's amazing!
  - jaequery 9y ago
    i never tried native script so i can't tell you for sure, but i hear that it produces code that works 100% on ios and android, whereas with React Native, it is platform dependent so you still need to modify code here and there to make it work. i'm not sure about performance though, i get mixed signals about it.
  - jkulubya 9y ago
    I wouldn’t say it’s more native, however, NativeScript gives you access to the entire API space of the target platform in JavaScript versus React Native which doesn’t. What this means is that if something doesn’t exist in NS land, you can open the Android or iOS docs and call the required api from JavaScript like so var context = ...; var button = new android.widget.Button(context); button.setText("My Button"); To achieve the same in RN, you have to drop down into Java/Swift/Obj-C and link back to your JavaScript. Same result, different means. See https://docs.nativescript.org/core-concepts/accessing-native-apis-with-javascript https://docs.nativescript.org/core-concepts/accessing-native...
deadcoder0904 9y ago
I personally feel nothing is as close as React Native right now. Whether it be Flutter or NativeScript or Weex. It will still require some time to mature as much as React Native is today.
laurent123456 9y ago
That seems like a very ambitious project, is there any company behind this? Otherwise I'm not sure it will work over the long term. Even React Native with Facebook (and Microsoft) behind it and years of development, it still feels like a beta product and many features are still missing. I wish an independent project could do better than that but it's unlikely.
- jkulubya 9y ago
  Progress (https://www.progress.com/ https://www.progress.com/) is behind NativeScript, and officially supports the two usual NativeScript stacks (plain JavaScript/Typescript & Angular). NativeScript + Vue is a community driven project that seems to be on its way to also being officially supported by Progress.
gagabity 9y ago
So does this also bundle a Javascript engine on Android to execute the code the same way RN does?
kyle_martin1 9y ago
For the love of God, we don't need anymore JS "native" app frameworks. Just learn Swift and Java like a competent engineer would.
- jonallanharper 9y ago
  Yea... that's was my sentiment as well. Build a React Native app from scratch and observe your tune changing.
- mephitix 9y ago
  Nah we need them for cross platform. But yes, learn Swift and Kotlin anyway!
  - antoniuschan99 9y ago
    Kotlin Native is progressing well?
- mikulas_florek 9y ago
  Making native UI in Java on Android is such huge PITA. While I've never used js/html app that was not bad, it's still 10x better.
  - testb 9y ago
    My experience would disagree. The layout system in Android is much more intuitive to me than CSS. It might depend on how customized you want your ui?
Justsignedup 9y ago
Call me ignorant, but isn't Vue.js effectively what backbone and ember were trying to do all those years back? Feels like React sort of changed the paradigm for the better. ::shrug::
mihaela 9y ago
This is the 100th thing claiming to be native when it's not. Like putting a "native" in it's name does not make it so.

125 points by lobo_tuerto 9y ago

I'm not quite impressed with the images I found online[1]. Does anyone have an example of a well-written that looks native using this? [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nativescript+vue&t=hf&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nativescript+vue&t=hf&iax=images&i...

sect2k 9y ago
https://www.nativescript.org/showcases https://www.nativescript.org/showcases This is a showcase for NativeScript in general, but AFAIK what you can do with NS, you can do with NS+Vue. The one thing I really like about NS is that it give you full access to native platform APIs in JavaScript.

pavlov 9y ago

Seems to be like React Native except with Vue instead?

k__ 9y ago
RN probably integrates better with React than NativeScript with Vue. You can also use Angular with NS, which workes much different than Vue.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  Weex is another RN equivalent for Vue: https://weex.incubator.apache.org/ https://weex.incubator.apache.org/ Not nearly as mature as RN though.
  - deadcoder0904 9y ago
    Weex is adopted well in the Chinese Community. From what I hear, its used in Alibaba (E Commerce site of China like Amazon) products. Its mature but you won't find well-written docs in English.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kyriakos 9y ago

Still has the same single thread limitations of react native?

thebigspacefuck 9y ago
The UI and JS run on the same thread, but you can offload some work to worker threads: https://docs.nativescript.org/angular/core-concepts/multithreading-model https://docs.nativescript.org/angular/core-concepts/multithr...

jeswin 9y ago

Apps running inside a JS vm on iOS or Android are not "truly native". Misappropriating an existing term (native app) to include such a design is uninviting; not even necessary. There are so many ways in which this is inferior to native code. And I say this as someone who works primarily with JavaScript.

Mayzie 9y ago
To be fair, "native" in this sense is exposing platform native UI components and libraries, which gives apps a native look and feel because, well, they _are_ native. For most apps that's all you'll ever need, and the performance overheard of running JS is negligible. For any performance critical code, you can write them in the platforms native code and interface with them via JavaScript. Unfortunately though, so many developers do not know how to write in the platforms preferred native language and you end up with components, like most of those listed on awesome-react-native[1], where they're entirely written in JS which: * sometimes emulate the native look and feel (often poorly), not _are_ the look and feel, and, * as a result, often perform super poorly compared to their native counterparts, and, * if emulating the native look and feel, and not implementing their own design/UI (which most do), that look and feel can break between OS upgrades and feel out of place, and, * often don't distinguish between platforms (i.e. the developer won't bother implementing the look and feel for Android, where the component is entirely compatible). [1] - https://github.com/jondot/awesome-react-native https://github.com/jondot/awesome-react-native
- benjaminl 9y ago
  To be truly fair the claim is "truly native", not just "native". If the claim was, native GUI, that would work, but "truly native" is a huge stretch. These apps are about as native as the Java based Eclipse IDE whose SWT based UI uses native GUI elements for display.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  My experience with React Native was that it doesn't consistently use native UI components, it uses UIViews that people have cobbled together into their own replications of varying quality. So if you want a big grid of items, you're not using a UICollectionView, you're reimplementing it yourself or finding someone else's attempt at that. Maybe this is because a UICollectionView doesn't have an identical counterpart on Android so it's easier to just redo it from scratch? But I'd be surprised if the performance of these things is as good as the real native ones, even if they make it out of UIViews. My other big complaint is that it doesn't help you with UI size classes. iOS apps change their layout depending on (generally) whether you're on an iPad (fullscreen / large split), or iPhone (and iPad small split, which is iPhone sized but much taller). The two weird exceptions being the iPad Pro having two full sized splits, and the Plus sized phones acting sort of iPad-like in landscape view. Anyone have an example of a React Native app that follows those conventions correctly? Last I checked the Facebook app (which I assume is something of a canonical example) doesn't even support split screen, and iOS 9 came out in 2015. This was a year or so ago that I was poking around at it, things may have improved since then?

sumedh 9y ago

> Sample apps: We’re looking for people to put this plugin through its paces and send feedback our way. Maybe they should build some sample apps before telling others to use the framework.

gremlinsinc 9y ago

Looks pretty sweet, I've been wanting a React Native like stack but with Vue as I much prefer working in Vue over React personally. I'll definitely have to try this out.

jaequery 9y ago

this is amazing! native script is just superior to react native in so many ways, always wanted to try but now that its paired with vue i may just jump head in! from what i hear, native script is more native than react native, 100% cross platform from ios and android, and much more performant than React Native. i can see this becoming a real contender very soon.

pka 9y ago
> native script is just superior to react native in so many ways Could you elaborate? If true that's amazing!
- jaequery 9y ago
  i never tried native script so i can't tell you for sure, but i hear that it produces code that works 100% on ios and android, whereas with React Native, it is platform dependent so you still need to modify code here and there to make it work. i'm not sure about performance though, i get mixed signals about it.
- jkulubya 9y ago
  I wouldn’t say it’s more native, however, NativeScript gives you access to the entire API space of the target platform in JavaScript versus React Native which doesn’t. What this means is that if something doesn’t exist in NS land, you can open the Android or iOS docs and call the required api from JavaScript like so var context = ...; var button = new android.widget.Button(context); button.setText("My Button"); To achieve the same in RN, you have to drop down into Java/Swift/Obj-C and link back to your JavaScript. Same result, different means. See https://docs.nativescript.org/core-concepts/accessing-native-apis-with-javascript https://docs.nativescript.org/core-concepts/accessing-native...

deadcoder0904 9y ago

I personally feel nothing is as close as React Native right now. Whether it be Flutter or NativeScript or Weex. It will still require some time to mature as much as React Native is today.

laurent123456 9y ago

That seems like a very ambitious project, is there any company behind this? Otherwise I'm not sure it will work over the long term. Even React Native with Facebook (and Microsoft) behind it and years of development, it still feels like a beta product and many features are still missing. I wish an independent project could do better than that but it's unlikely.

jkulubya 9y ago
Progress (https://www.progress.com/ https://www.progress.com/) is behind NativeScript, and officially supports the two usual NativeScript stacks (plain JavaScript/Typescript & Angular). NativeScript + Vue is a community driven project that seems to be on its way to also being officially supported by Progress.

gagabity 9y ago

So does this also bundle a Javascript engine on Android to execute the code the same way RN does?

kyle_martin1 9y ago

For the love of God, we don't need anymore JS "native" app frameworks. Just learn Swift and Java like a competent engineer would.

jonallanharper 9y ago
Yea... that's was my sentiment as well. Build a React Native app from scratch and observe your tune changing.
mephitix 9y ago
Nah we need them for cross platform. But yes, learn Swift and Kotlin anyway!
- antoniuschan99 9y ago
  Kotlin Native is progressing well?
mikulas_florek 9y ago
Making native UI in Java on Android is such huge PITA. While I've never used js/html app that was not bad, it's still 10x better.
- testb 9y ago
  My experience would disagree. The layout system in Android is much more intuitive to me than CSS. It might depend on how customized you want your ui?

Justsignedup 9y ago

Call me ignorant, but isn't Vue.js effectively what backbone and ember were trying to do all those years back? Feels like React sort of changed the paradigm for the better. ::shrug::

mihaela 9y ago

This is the 100th thing claiming to be native when it's not. Like putting a "native" in it's name does not make it so.