11 ms·

We're nagging because the apps suck and stick out like a sore thumb. Maybe Flutter will be the one to get there and be the holy grail of cross platform UI devel

We're nagging because the apps suck and stick out like a sore thumb. Maybe Flutter will be the one to get there and be the holy grail of cross platform UI development, but the developer community has been burned by this promise so many times, we're going to have to see the final product before getting excited. Just because a project is ambitious doesn't mean we should all jump on board, particularly when similar projects have crashed and burned, and there's really nothing stand-out about Flutter that separates it from prior efforts.

throwaway123x2 6y ago
Oof remember when PhoneGap was the next big thing? RIP
- TheGuyWhoCodes 6y ago
  I remember big corps betting on phonegap and sencha for mobile 7 years ago. I also remember big corps betting on GWT. Those were painful days...
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    Funnily enough, Sencha still can't be reliably recreated by any lib/framework/browser built-ins du jour (without sinking as much effort as Sencha did): https://examples.sencha.com/extjs/7.3.0/examples/kitchensink/?modern#all https://examples.sencha.com/extjs/7.3.0/examples/kitchensink...
    - cztomsik 6y ago
      true, just like wysiwyg we have for react/vue/angular is still joke when compared to delphi/visual studio
- The_rationalist 6y ago
  Pure nonsense, phonegap has been renamed Cordova and is widely used. The Electron of smartphones is Ionic which is a sexy and performant superset of Cordova. PhoneGap (Cordova + Ionic marketshare) has a bigger marketshare than flutter and react native! Source: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/app-framework/android-app-frameworks https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/app-framework/a... Ionic is a gift and it will only get more widespread, the myth that chromium is slow is increasingly dying. Also, did you notice the irony/hypocrisy that flutter is using the rendering engine made by chrome developers for Chrome developers ?
  - raihansaputra 6y ago
    Ionic has released Capacitor as the successor for Cordova. And it's still compatible with Cordova plugins so all the work from Cordova days is not wasted. Ionic is definitely a gift.
- auganov 6y ago
  Time is on webview apps' side. IMO cordova/phonegap got too big too early and the industry still has a revulsion that may not be justified anymore. I don't think they will ever come to dominate, but I do think hybrids will eventually go back to using webviews. If groundbreaking UX is your core competency you need native. Hybrids get you neither the best feel nor the best dev leverage. Hybrids are selling the exact same dream phonegap has. But they let developers distance themselves from the bad rep and claim they're doing something different. Alternatively, at the other end, they get developers to build essentially native apps while pretending to save a lot of time.
hanniabu 6y ago
I don't understand why more resources aren't being put into Qt and making that easier to use or building a more "web-developer-friendly" abstraction layer on top.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Qt's QML + QtQuick follow the declarative and reactive programming paradigms and use JavaScript, and were released before React existed.
  - ognarb 6y ago
    And it has a very nice developer experience :)
- danShumway 6y ago
  I don't know if they've changed their approach over the past year, but the last time I looked at Qt demos for the web, I was solidly unimpressed. At the time, they were making almost all of the same mistakes that Flutter is, and the devs I talked to seemed to be of the opinion that those problems wouldn't be fixed until browsers started adding brand new capabilities specifically for them. Looking now at the demos at https://www.qt.io/qt-examples-for-webassembly https://www.qt.io/qt-examples-for-webassembly, a lot of the same problems are jumping out at me. A complete lack of accessibility features, poor handling of scroll events, large load times, unfocusable fields, lack of keyboard controls, etc... Halfway through playing with their pizza app, the page just froze and stopped responding to any clicks at all. Maybe those demos are outdated? Blazor and Rust are showing a lot of promise here, but from what I know about Qt I'm much less optimistic, because Qt is used to handling everything about rendering itself -- and as Flutter is showing that's just not a good approach to building web GUI frameworks. But (again, purely from what I've seen) trying to layer on a system where Qt is actually interacting with the DOM seems like it would require a somewhat difficult shift in its architecture. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem though.
  - gagege 6y ago
    Whoa, yeah, none of those Qt demos are good or even seem to work properly. Yikes.
drewda 6y ago
On this note, I have 60% fond memories of Appcelerator Titanium and 40% frustrating memories :)
- JamesSwift 6y ago
  Man those are some rosy glasses you got. I've got 20% fond memories, 80% frustrating memories : )
- mattschmulen 6y ago
  Yup, really they had the right idea in that it was native components that were hoisted by JavaScript binding... it really lost steam because it became easier to just build native Swift (and later kotlin android). It was a solid play at the problem in it’s time. Note: I worked at Appcelerator in the “gogo” years and it was great, and they/we almost made it happen in a real way.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

throwaway123x2 6y ago

Oof remember when PhoneGap was the next big thing? RIP

TheGuyWhoCodes 6y ago
I remember big corps betting on phonegap and sencha for mobile 7 years ago. I also remember big corps betting on GWT. Those were painful days...
- dmitriid 6y ago
  Funnily enough, Sencha still can't be reliably recreated by any lib/framework/browser built-ins du jour (without sinking as much effort as Sencha did): https://examples.sencha.com/extjs/7.3.0/examples/kitchensink/?modern#all https://examples.sencha.com/extjs/7.3.0/examples/kitchensink...
  - cztomsik 6y ago
    true, just like wysiwyg we have for react/vue/angular is still joke when compared to delphi/visual studio
The_rationalist 6y ago
Pure nonsense, phonegap has been renamed Cordova and is widely used. The Electron of smartphones is Ionic which is a sexy and performant superset of Cordova. PhoneGap (Cordova + Ionic marketshare) has a bigger marketshare than flutter and react native! Source: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/app-framework/android-app-frameworks https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/app-framework/a... Ionic is a gift and it will only get more widespread, the myth that chromium is slow is increasingly dying. Also, did you notice the irony/hypocrisy that flutter is using the rendering engine made by chrome developers for Chrome developers ?
- raihansaputra 6y ago
  Ionic has released Capacitor as the successor for Cordova. And it's still compatible with Cordova plugins so all the work from Cordova days is not wasted. Ionic is definitely a gift.
auganov 6y ago
Time is on webview apps' side. IMO cordova/phonegap got too big too early and the industry still has a revulsion that may not be justified anymore. I don't think they will ever come to dominate, but I do think hybrids will eventually go back to using webviews. If groundbreaking UX is your core competency you need native. Hybrids get you neither the best feel nor the best dev leverage. Hybrids are selling the exact same dream phonegap has. But they let developers distance themselves from the bad rep and claim they're doing something different. Alternatively, at the other end, they get developers to build essentially native apps while pretending to save a lot of time.

hanniabu 6y ago

I don't understand why more resources aren't being put into Qt and making that easier to use or building a more "web-developer-friendly" abstraction layer on top.

heavyset_go 6y ago
Qt's QML + QtQuick follow the declarative and reactive programming paradigms and use JavaScript, and were released before React existed.
- ognarb 6y ago
  And it has a very nice developer experience :)
danShumway 6y ago
I don't know if they've changed their approach over the past year, but the last time I looked at Qt demos for the web, I was solidly unimpressed. At the time, they were making almost all of the same mistakes that Flutter is, and the devs I talked to seemed to be of the opinion that those problems wouldn't be fixed until browsers started adding brand new capabilities specifically for them. Looking now at the demos at https://www.qt.io/qt-examples-for-webassembly https://www.qt.io/qt-examples-for-webassembly, a lot of the same problems are jumping out at me. A complete lack of accessibility features, poor handling of scroll events, large load times, unfocusable fields, lack of keyboard controls, etc... Halfway through playing with their pizza app, the page just froze and stopped responding to any clicks at all. Maybe those demos are outdated? Blazor and Rust are showing a lot of promise here, but from what I know about Qt I'm much less optimistic, because Qt is used to handling everything about rendering itself -- and as Flutter is showing that's just not a good approach to building web GUI frameworks. But (again, purely from what I've seen) trying to layer on a system where Qt is actually interacting with the DOM seems like it would require a somewhat difficult shift in its architecture. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem though.
- gagege 6y ago
  Whoa, yeah, none of those Qt demos are good or even seem to work properly. Yikes.

drewda 6y ago

On this note, I have 60% fond memories of Appcelerator Titanium and 40% frustrating memories :)

JamesSwift 6y ago
Man those are some rosy glasses you got. I've got 20% fond memories, 80% frustrating memories : )
mattschmulen 6y ago
Yup, really they had the right idea in that it was native components that were hoisted by JavaScript binding... it really lost steam because it became easier to just build native Swift (and later kotlin android). It was a solid play at the problem in it’s time. Note: I worked at Appcelerator in the “gogo” years and it was great, and they/we almost made it happen in a real way.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]