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Mobile app is most most certainly going to be made using html and javascript in the time to come. Ionic and angular is great for building mobile apps with stand

Mobile app is most most certainly going to be made using html and javascript in the time to come. Ionic and angular is great for building mobile apps with standard mobile UI elements like headers with back buttons and chevrons, pages that slides in from the side, modals and tab bars at the bottom of the screen. Everything is meticulously created in html, css and javascript. Scrolling is good enough for most usecases, but if your pages contains long list views with graphic elements the page starts to lag. However if you use famo.us' list view scrolling is nearly as fast and smooth as native code on iPhone 4. On newer phones to difference between hybrid apps and native is unnoticeable. At the moment famo.us only has low level components, like boxes with html content. Standard back buttons, chevrons, tabs, action sheets and icons has to be imported from elsewhere. Famo.us only does fast bouncy animations, touch events and 3d effects. Besides famo.us is working on their phonegap/cordova alternative wrapper. A combination of Ionics ease of use and famo.us' impressive speed would have been great. There's lot of promising little open source projects on github that either extends famo.us or integrates it with javascript MVC libraries. I believe Brendan Eich was right when he said "Always bet on JS!". I bet mobile app development is going to be dominated by JavaScript and HTML.

cfontes 12y ago
Very nice comment. Thank you !
no_future 12y ago
What a dreadful notion, I hope this never happens. Development on mobile devices is a great way to develop on a web connected platform that reaches lots of consumers, but instead of using horrible, ancient tools that are expected to do things today that they were never designed to do at the time of their inception(HTML/CSS/Javascript), you can use capable systems languages like C(and now Swift, which I have no experience with but have heard generally good things about) and Java. That I call traditional frontend web tech ancient and out of place today isn't even really an opinion - the deluge of Javascript/CSS frameworks, compile-to languages,and lists of best practices would suggest that something is wrong there. Web stuff is just way easier to get into so there are a huge amount of developers available, especially the types who spend more time yapping on their blogs about the latest overhyped software trend than actually writing software. I don't know about animations and whatnot, but for games and image processing i.e. 2 enormous chunks of all mobile software, Javascript isn't replacing anything anytime soon. I don't understand why someone would want to spend hours trying to optimize languages which weren't designed to run native software on a platform to be as effective as the ones that were when you could just write the software in the native language, to me this just seems like an exercise in futility. Even moreso considering the fact that Javascript and HTML are horribly unproductive languages, though I suppose since so many people know them well they can be more productive in them than in a language they don't know.
- findjashua 12y ago
  This comment would be spot on 2 years ago, but once you try libraries like Ractive or React, it's iOS/Android that begin to feel ancient. How do they not have data binding in 2014? Also, having to maintain a separate codebase for each platform just seems inefficient. The solution doesn't have to be Javascript (could be C#), though Ractive and React make it surprisingly pleasant to write JS.
  - andwaal 12y ago
    You know that one of the main things that React(w/flux) tries to fix is all the errors made because of data binding..
    - findjashua 12y ago
      I use that term loosely to mean that my even-handlers only have to update the component's data, and the library takes care of updating the view. That said, I've used Ractive for a while (on my own time), and haven't run into any issues. But I'm curious to know more and would like to try it out. Could you give me an example where data binding would cause errors?
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    Only if you never tried XAML Data Bindings.
    - findjashua 12y ago
      I'm assuming you're talking about Xamarin? If so, $1000/yr is pretty expensive for small teams.
- scriptproof 12y ago
  "instead of using horrible, ancient tools" (JavaScript=1995, HTML 5 spec=2014) "use capable systems languages like C" (Objective-C=1982, C=1972, Java=1994). WTF?
pjmlp 12y ago
> I bet mobile app development is going to be dominated by JavaScript and HTML. If that is all one knows, sure. Luckily there are other alternatives, Xamarin, Qt, SDL, Cocos2D, Unreal, Unity...
al2o3cr 12y ago
"Scrolling is good enough for most usecases" Is this really where we're happy being as an industry? "Don't worry, since you've got the most powerful pocket computer ever shipped the scrolling is usually only mildly terrible."

cfontes 12y ago

Very nice comment. Thank you !

no_future 12y ago

What a dreadful notion, I hope this never happens. Development on mobile devices is a great way to develop on a web connected platform that reaches lots of consumers, but instead of using horrible, ancient tools that are expected to do things today that they were never designed to do at the time of their inception(HTML/CSS/Javascript), you can use capable systems languages like C(and now Swift, which I have no experience with but have heard generally good things about) and Java. That I call traditional frontend web tech ancient and out of place today isn't even really an opinion - the deluge of Javascript/CSS frameworks, compile-to languages,and lists of best practices would suggest that something is wrong there. Web stuff is just way easier to get into so there are a huge amount of developers available, especially the types who spend more time yapping on their blogs about the latest overhyped software trend than actually writing software. I don't know about animations and whatnot, but for games and image processing i.e. 2 enormous chunks of all mobile software, Javascript isn't replacing anything anytime soon. I don't understand why someone would want to spend hours trying to optimize languages which weren't designed to run native software on a platform to be as effective as the ones that were when you could just write the software in the native language, to me this just seems like an exercise in futility. Even moreso considering the fact that Javascript and HTML are horribly unproductive languages, though I suppose since so many people know them well they can be more productive in them than in a language they don't know.

findjashua 12y ago
This comment would be spot on 2 years ago, but once you try libraries like Ractive or React, it's iOS/Android that begin to feel ancient. How do they not have data binding in 2014? Also, having to maintain a separate codebase for each platform just seems inefficient. The solution doesn't have to be Javascript (could be C#), though Ractive and React make it surprisingly pleasant to write JS.
- andwaal 12y ago
  You know that one of the main things that React(w/flux) tries to fix is all the errors made because of data binding..
  - findjashua 12y ago
    I use that term loosely to mean that my even-handlers only have to update the component's data, and the library takes care of updating the view. That said, I've used Ractive for a while (on my own time), and haven't run into any issues. But I'm curious to know more and would like to try it out. Could you give me an example where data binding would cause errors?
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Only if you never tried XAML Data Bindings.
  - findjashua 12y ago
    I'm assuming you're talking about Xamarin? If so, $1000/yr is pretty expensive for small teams.
scriptproof 12y ago
"instead of using horrible, ancient tools" (JavaScript=1995, HTML 5 spec=2014) "use capable systems languages like C" (Objective-C=1982, C=1972, Java=1994). WTF?

pjmlp 12y ago

> I bet mobile app development is going to be dominated by JavaScript and HTML. If that is all one knows, sure. Luckily there are other alternatives, Xamarin, Qt, SDL, Cocos2D, Unreal, Unity...

al2o3cr 12y ago

"Scrolling is good enough for most usecases" Is this really where we're happy being as an industry? "Don't worry, since you've got the most powerful pocket computer ever shipped the scrolling is usually only mildly terrible."