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> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Expecations have changed. It is 2004, your company needs a simple

> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper". Expecations have changed. It is 2004, your company needs a simple CRUD app so your employees can work with some structured data in a DB somewhere, let's say so sales can check inventory levels in an existing database. A single developer can start up a Winforms project and throw something together in a matter of days to weeks. It can only be used by people on desktops running Windows while they are at the office, but that is fine because that is the world of 2004. 2022, your sales team needs to access inventory levels in a database. Assuming you haven't already been sold some multi-million dollar solution to do this (and you likely have, multiple times, and at least some of the implementations have failed), you now have the following requirements: 1. Some of your employees use Apple laptops, some use Windows. 2. People want to be able to access the data on their phones as well, which adds another 2 OSes to the mix. 3. Restricting the app to being onsite in the office doesn't cut it. So, you can write 4 (!!) native apps. The ugly WinForms one is still simple, but you can either adopt a proprietary "simple app building" solution for the other 3 OSes (or just use it for all 4 OSes), and have serious issues finding devs who know the niche tech you've picked, or you can make a website. Now, native apps on smart phones are a constant maintenance headache. Major OS releases break things on mobile all the time, and entire APIs get deprecated. (Another reason why writing against Windows is good, that Winforms app from 2004 probably runs just fine with 0 changes in 2022) It is easier to maintain 1 website than 2 mobile apps and 2 desktop apps. So, website it is. What framework are you going to use? Whatever one is stable, easy to hire for, and has the best tooling. OK so I wouldn't call React "stable", hopefully it has undergone its last major redesign for awhile (LOL), but there is tons of tooling for it. Of course the docs suck compared to what Microsoft had in 2004, because it turns out part of that $500 per seat license for Visual Studio went towards amazing documentation and example code. And because Web you'll get breaking changes now and then, but it still is easier than maintaining 4 native apps. People underestimate how simple Windows everywhere made life for developers. Amazing documentation, stupid good tooling, and an obscenely stable platform to develop against. A major OS version came out what, once every 3 or 4 years? And unless you were writing drivers, that major OS version wasn't going to break anything.

CRConrad 5y ago
> So, you can write 4 (!!) native apps. The ugly WinForms one is still simple, but you can either adopt a proprietary "simple app building" solution for the other 3 OSes (or just use it for all 4 OSes), and have serious issues finding devs who know the niche tech you've picked, or you can make a website. Or you can adopt a free software / open source simple app building solution for all four OSes (or, hm, at least three of them -- not quite sure about iOS) that compiles natively on these and many other OSes. Sure, the UI would preferably be designed differently for desktop vs small-screen mobile, but you have that problem with Electron too, don't you?
avereveard 5y ago
you're not wrong, but react/electron aren't the same ballpark as winform, flutter or xamarin forms are.
- com2kid 5y ago
  React Native is a direct competitor to Flutter. And internal websites are a direct competitor to Winforms. Every year someone telling me Xamarine forms is better now, but every year someone tells me that they tried Xamarine forms the year prior and it still wasn't any good. My one experience with Xamarine forms was watching 3 apps teams (WinPhone, Android, and iOS) all struggle to write an app. Given that it took 3 teams, and it was a large effort, I wasn't impressed, but this was 6 or so years ago. I hope things have improved since then! Fun fact, for awhile Silverlight was huge in the internal website world, and Microsoft could have easily had another decade of lock-in going on, but then MS killed Silverlight due to internal politics, and even the most loyal MS customers saw the writing on the wall and redirected their internal development efforts elsewhere. 90s Microsoft would never have abandoned a technology stack that had wide spread internal corporate adoption. :/
erosenbe0 5y ago
Don't forget supporting several localizations, currencies, timezones, and reformatting numbers and seperators dependent on region & user preference. Alrighty, BRB while I finish my dropdown for converting from metric to "donkeyhooves per camelpower."

CRConrad 5y ago

> So, you can write 4 (!!) native apps. The ugly WinForms one is still simple, but you can either adopt a proprietary "simple app building" solution for the other 3 OSes (or just use it for all 4 OSes), and have serious issues finding devs who know the niche tech you've picked, or you can make a website. Or you can adopt a free software / open source simple app building solution for all four OSes (or, hm, at least three of them -- not quite sure about iOS) that compiles natively on these and many other OSes. Sure, the UI would preferably be designed differently for desktop vs small-screen mobile, but you have that problem with Electron too, don't you?

avereveard 5y ago

you're not wrong, but react/electron aren't the same ballpark as winform, flutter or xamarin forms are.

com2kid 5y ago
React Native is a direct competitor to Flutter. And internal websites are a direct competitor to Winforms. Every year someone telling me Xamarine forms is better now, but every year someone tells me that they tried Xamarine forms the year prior and it still wasn't any good. My one experience with Xamarine forms was watching 3 apps teams (WinPhone, Android, and iOS) all struggle to write an app. Given that it took 3 teams, and it was a large effort, I wasn't impressed, but this was 6 or so years ago. I hope things have improved since then! Fun fact, for awhile Silverlight was huge in the internal website world, and Microsoft could have easily had another decade of lock-in going on, but then MS killed Silverlight due to internal politics, and even the most loyal MS customers saw the writing on the wall and redirected their internal development efforts elsewhere. 90s Microsoft would never have abandoned a technology stack that had wide spread internal corporate adoption. :/

erosenbe0 5y ago

Don't forget supporting several localizations, currencies, timezones, and reformatting numbers and seperators dependent on region & user preference. Alrighty, BRB while I finish my dropdown for converting from metric to "donkeyhooves per camelpower."