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Nativescript is fantastic -- I maintain that it's better than React Native because React Native lacks a native JS->platform translation layer and React-land is

Nativescript is fantastic -- I maintain that it's better than React Native because React Native lacks a native JS->platform translation layer and React-land is crazy sauce, and can't really be compared with Flutter (because of how Flutter works), but I still think it's better there even because I'd pick Typescript over Dart, and I don't have to commit so hard to the ecosystem. I've used Nativescript in production and it was wonderfully productive. I think it's biggest weak point is suffering from lack of recent support/ecosystem that hype usually brings. The ability to use your frontend framework of choice (Angular, Vue, Svelte, Vanilla JS) is awesome, and I think can be incredibly productive for businesses (turn your frontend devs into mobile devs).

Apocryphon 6y ago
Progress is no Facebook/Google/Microsoft, but it's good that there's someone actively working on the framework. Shame they haven't tried to market NativeScript as an alternative to React Native. At least it's better known that other random enterprise cross-platform solutions that seem to exist only on SEO-optimized listicles of cross-platform solutions such as Codename One, RhoMobile, Kony, Framework7, - e.g. https://www.way2smile.ae/blog/cross-platform-mobile-app-development-tools-2021/ https://www.way2smile.ae/blog/cross-platform-mobile-app-deve... (Again, what companies are actually building apps with these things?)
- FreezerburnV 6y ago
  Hm, CodenameOne is actually something I was planning on making use of at some point in the future. I’m (solo) working on a Swing app that I want to bring to mobile, so it seemed like a good fit to convert to it or write a branch that used it. Is it actually a dumpster fire to be wary of?
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Not that I know of, it just seems like one of those frameworks that exists and there is some online chatter mentioning it but I have no idea who actually uses it. If it turns out to be good you should let people about it!
  - invalidname 6y ago
    I'm biased but it's pretty good and actually has a community behind it.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      That's interesting to hear- where's the online community for Codename One located? I did find some Udemy courses for it, so there's that.
      - invalidname 6y ago
        https://groups.google.com/g/codenameone-discussions https://groups.google.com/g/codenameone-discussions https://stackoverflow.com/tags/codenameone https://stackoverflow.com/tags/codenameone and the github project. It isn't huge but it's been going on for nearly a decade with the same people.
    - FreezerburnV 6y ago
      Good to know, thanks! I’ll have to check out the links to the community when I get a chance too. Always good to know that a piece of tech you’d planned on using is healthy.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  So Progress actually handed over development to a company called nStudio relatively recently. The proof/PR announcement feels like it's been wiped off the internet but there are traces still[0]. They've been great stewards so far -- improving the codebase and going after long-standing pain points, but it's worth mentioning. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/nativescript/comments/gv968e/progress_hands_off_responsibility_for_future/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nativescript/comments/gv968e/progre...
bikeshaving 6y ago
The one thing I wonder, can you explain why the Vue wrapper around React Native (https://github.com/GeekyAnts/vue-native-core/stargazers https://github.com/GeekyAnts/vue-native-core/stargazers) seems to be more popular than Vue NativeScript (https://github.com/nativescript-vue/nativescript-vue/stargazers https://github.com/nativescript-vue/nativescript-vue/stargaz...)? I’m confused by why Vue developers of all people would use a Facebook/React stack for native development, so I assumed there had to be some advantage to using React Native.
- ivan_ah 6y ago
  My guess would be > Seamless interop with React Native. Use core React Native components with Vue.js syntax out of the box
baybal2 6y ago
We used Nativescript in production, and it is unending train wreck. I advise everybody to avoid Nativescript for as long they self-qualify their project as anything serious. The ecosystem, and upstream looks really much like the Wordpress plugin world, and is grossly unprofessional. On the technical side, you will be always struggling with OOM, I/O performance, and the fact that you will be spending MORE time on native code for both Android, and Ios than if you did them separately.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  Would you mind expanding on the OOM and I/O performance issues you ran into? The ecosystem being less than enterprise-grade was known to me, but I did not run into any OOM or I/O performance issues. Also, did you try either Flutter or React Native afterwards or go straight to native? Did you find them better?
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > OOM and I/O performance issues you ran into? Sure, very simple react and vue apps regularly run into memory leaks upon navigating views, with most memory being leaked in UI part managed by nativescript, and not in the JS logic. NS does not do it's job freeing memory from UI. The natural JS leakiness gets amplified if a leaked part references any JS object. Performance suffers whenever any native API gets called from a JS loop, as exporting Java's objects into JS, and accessing them is very resource intensive. The only way around it was to move loops to Java side of the code. > Also, did you try either Flutter or React Native afterwards or go straight to native? Did you find them better? Flutter is not much better, though feels to be a bit more professionally done. It's too a memory hog, it's too a CPU hog, and it's still gets way more issues over a native app to warrant its use just for economic reasons. RN also shares the same Java-JS interop issues as NS.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      What kind of app was it?
    - 6y ago
arcturus17 6y ago
> React-land is crazy sauce In what sense? I develop my front ends primarily in React, and other than hooks - which a lot of people have adopted anyway, and only extended the lib - the API seems very stable. The 3rd party library ecosystem may be wild because React is superpopular and people are publishing npm packages with half-baked solutions of dubious utility, but there's always a good library or two for 95% of tasks (good: regularly maintainted, fully-featured, well-documented, tested, typed, etc.). I don't have any experience with RN so I don't know how things are there, but your comment seems to be about the React ecosystem at large and doesn't correspond to my experience at all.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  I wouldn't consider myself a React expert because I basically stopped using it or recommending it once Vue came out, but stuff like: - Needing shouldComponentUpdate to do anything nontrivial (it's a bad sign for what should be a library if people make "X demystified"[0] posts). - The sheer amount of times React has been basically rewritten, with - Hooks (to be fair Vue has this too, and it's not actually a bad feature, but as usual React introduced it in a near inscrutable way). - Every react codebase cargo-culting into Flux (normally through redux) when all you really need most of the time is a simple AJAX call. React had the initial idea, but it just feels like the stuff that came after (Vue in particular) delivered better on the simplicity we all wanted. There are so many little gotchas all over the place that people just paper over/memorize, when Vue 2/3 basically works as advertised right out of the box, need(ed?) less hacks, and you can get reasonably productive and performant in <1 day after reading all the docs. Also I want to point out that "react" is almost always react + redux + react-router + webpack at the end of the day. The combined complexity is not worth it when compared to Vue in my opinion. These days if I want to use something, I do vue + vue-router + parcel and call it a day, and get productive much quicker though the ecosystem isn't quite as big. For uber-simplicity I like mithril[2][3] though -- but it falls down when you start looking at advanced features like SSR/rehydration. React has the best third party support/ecosystem because of the amount of hype and OSS friendly companies that are using and benefiting from React. It also is the best corporate choice -- react developers are more fungible, you will benefit from more of the free work done by the F/OSS crowd, etc. [0]: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/react-shouldcomponentupdate-demystified-c5d323099ef6 https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/react-shouldcomponentupdat... [1]: https://backbonejs.org/#View https://backbonejs.org/#View [2]: https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js/ https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js/ [3]: https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js/issues/1838 https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js/issues/1838

Apocryphon 6y ago

Progress is no Facebook/Google/Microsoft, but it's good that there's someone actively working on the framework. Shame they haven't tried to market NativeScript as an alternative to React Native. At least it's better known that other random enterprise cross-platform solutions that seem to exist only on SEO-optimized listicles of cross-platform solutions such as Codename One, RhoMobile, Kony, Framework7, - e.g. https://www.way2smile.ae/blog/cross-platform-mobile-app-development-tools-2021/ https://www.way2smile.ae/blog/cross-platform-mobile-app-deve... (Again, what companies are actually building apps with these things?)

FreezerburnV 6y ago
Hm, CodenameOne is actually something I was planning on making use of at some point in the future. I’m (solo) working on a Swing app that I want to bring to mobile, so it seemed like a good fit to convert to it or write a branch that used it. Is it actually a dumpster fire to be wary of?
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Not that I know of, it just seems like one of those frameworks that exists and there is some online chatter mentioning it but I have no idea who actually uses it. If it turns out to be good you should let people about it!
- invalidname 6y ago
  I'm biased but it's pretty good and actually has a community behind it.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    That's interesting to hear- where's the online community for Codename One located? I did find some Udemy courses for it, so there's that.
    - invalidname 6y ago
      https://groups.google.com/g/codenameone-discussions https://groups.google.com/g/codenameone-discussions https://stackoverflow.com/tags/codenameone https://stackoverflow.com/tags/codenameone and the github project. It isn't huge but it's been going on for nearly a decade with the same people.
  - FreezerburnV 6y ago
    Good to know, thanks! I’ll have to check out the links to the community when I get a chance too. Always good to know that a piece of tech you’d planned on using is healthy.
hardwaresofton 6y ago
So Progress actually handed over development to a company called nStudio relatively recently. The proof/PR announcement feels like it's been wiped off the internet but there are traces still[0]. They've been great stewards so far -- improving the codebase and going after long-standing pain points, but it's worth mentioning. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/nativescript/comments/gv968e/progress_hands_off_responsibility_for_future/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nativescript/comments/gv968e/progre...

bikeshaving 6y ago

The one thing I wonder, can you explain why the Vue wrapper around React Native (https://github.com/GeekyAnts/vue-native-core/stargazers https://github.com/GeekyAnts/vue-native-core/stargazers) seems to be more popular than Vue NativeScript (https://github.com/nativescript-vue/nativescript-vue/stargazers https://github.com/nativescript-vue/nativescript-vue/stargaz...)? I’m confused by why Vue developers of all people would use a Facebook/React stack for native development, so I assumed there had to be some advantage to using React Native.

ivan_ah 6y ago
My guess would be > Seamless interop with React Native. Use core React Native components with Vue.js syntax out of the box

baybal2 6y ago

We used Nativescript in production, and it is unending train wreck. I advise everybody to avoid Nativescript for as long they self-qualify their project as anything serious. The ecosystem, and upstream looks really much like the Wordpress plugin world, and is grossly unprofessional. On the technical side, you will be always struggling with OOM, I/O performance, and the fact that you will be spending MORE time on native code for both Android, and Ios than if you did them separately.

hardwaresofton 6y ago
Would you mind expanding on the OOM and I/O performance issues you ran into? The ecosystem being less than enterprise-grade was known to me, but I did not run into any OOM or I/O performance issues. Also, did you try either Flutter or React Native afterwards or go straight to native? Did you find them better?
- baybal2 6y ago
  > OOM and I/O performance issues you ran into? Sure, very simple react and vue apps regularly run into memory leaks upon navigating views, with most memory being leaked in UI part managed by nativescript, and not in the JS logic. NS does not do it's job freeing memory from UI. The natural JS leakiness gets amplified if a leaked part references any JS object. Performance suffers whenever any native API gets called from a JS loop, as exporting Java's objects into JS, and accessing them is very resource intensive. The only way around it was to move loops to Java side of the code. > Also, did you try either Flutter or React Native afterwards or go straight to native? Did you find them better? Flutter is not much better, though feels to be a bit more professionally done. It's too a memory hog, it's too a CPU hog, and it's still gets way more issues over a native app to warrant its use just for economic reasons. RN also shares the same Java-JS interop issues as NS.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    What kind of app was it?
  - 6y ago

arcturus17 6y ago

> React-land is crazy sauce In what sense? I develop my front ends primarily in React, and other than hooks - which a lot of people have adopted anyway, and only extended the lib - the API seems very stable. The 3rd party library ecosystem may be wild because React is superpopular and people are publishing npm packages with half-baked solutions of dubious utility, but there's always a good library or two for 95% of tasks (good: regularly maintainted, fully-featured, well-documented, tested, typed, etc.). I don't have any experience with RN so I don't know how things are there, but your comment seems to be about the React ecosystem at large and doesn't correspond to my experience at all.

hardwaresofton 6y ago
I wouldn't consider myself a React expert because I basically stopped using it or recommending it once Vue came out, but stuff like: - Needing shouldComponentUpdate to do anything nontrivial (it's a bad sign for what should be a library if people make "X demystified"[0] posts). - The sheer amount of times React has been basically rewritten, with - Hooks (to be fair Vue has this too, and it's not actually a bad feature, but as usual React introduced it in a near inscrutable way). - Every react codebase cargo-culting into Flux (normally through redux) when all you really need most of the time is a simple AJAX call. React had the initial idea, but it just feels like the stuff that came after (Vue in particular) delivered better on the simplicity we all wanted. There are so many little gotchas all over the place that people just paper over/memorize, when Vue 2/3 basically works as advertised right out of the box, need(ed?) less hacks, and you can get reasonably productive and performant in <1 day after reading all the docs. Also I want to point out that "react" is almost always react + redux + react-router + webpack at the end of the day. The combined complexity is not worth it when compared to Vue in my opinion. These days if I want to use something, I do vue + vue-router + parcel and call it a day, and get productive much quicker though the ecosystem isn't quite as big. For uber-simplicity I like mithril[2][3] though -- but it falls down when you start looking at advanced features like SSR/rehydration. React has the best third party support/ecosystem because of the amount of hype and OSS friendly companies that are using and benefiting from React. It also is the best corporate choice -- react developers are more fungible, you will benefit from more of the free work done by the F/OSS crowd, etc. [0]: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/react-shouldcomponentupdate-demystified-c5d323099ef6 https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/react-shouldcomponentupdat... [1]: https://backbonejs.org/#View https://backbonejs.org/#View [2]: https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js/ https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js/ [3]: https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js/issues/1838 https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js/issues/1838