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Why you should NOT use NativeScript

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Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript

#61

Post by gagege »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #45

I’ve never heard of “NativeScript,” so I can’t understand why a company would risk something as high-stakes as their android app on that. I’m sure it has a lot of benefits but the reality is that it’s still immature. Save the experimental technology for the low-stakes stuff. That’s just disciplined engineering practice.

My guess is it's a Microsoft shop where the most used technology was ASP.NET Webforms and then later Angular. They saw that Telerik (a favorite of enterprisey MS shops) had a cross-platform app framework based on Angular, and they decided to stick with what they knew. I've worked at a couple of these places.

Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript

#62

Post by Conlectus »

modeswitch wrote: post #59
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard great things about Flutter, and Flutter 2 sounds very interesting. However, I don't trust Google not to get bored and change directions, and so I won't invest my time until Flutter is strategically important to their business.

I had this conversation with a support engineer for Google Cloud one time. I mentioned that Google has a long history of dumping products that people rely on and he got really annoyed, as if that wasn't true. I don't know if they fully appreciate that they have a reputation for this.

Hard to want to believe something if it means nobody will care about your work no matter how good it is for reasons out of your control.

Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript

#63

Post by isochronous »

yagizdegirmenci wrote: post #50

OP having a lesson about flip-side of open source software. I have never written JavaScript or NativeScript but it is very uncomfortable to read a aggressive commentary about an OSS. > 2. Documentation is ridiculous > They are behind with the docs for years. They always promise that the next version’s documentation will be really finished and will be awesome and contain everything. So what? That's your responsibility…

Jesus, dude, OSS is not some kind of holy grail that renders it immune from all criticism, much less valid criticism.

1. I agree about the "you're free not to use it" line, but I frequently find that documentation can seem comprehensive when you're evaluating something, but as soon as you get deeper into the weeds, that's when the shortcomings reveal themselves. And telling someone to "help them" when they themselves are looking for documentation to get help? That's just laughable. I sure as heck wouldn't want someone who can't get my product to work to be submitting documentation PRs.

2. This is just snide. Refusing to help someone because they're expressing frustration is simply spiteful. You have no more information than the rest of us about what was actually asked, so implying that the author "had it coming" seems uncalled for.

3. Then you're not very familiar with the OSS economy, are you? There are frequently paid support plans available for major OSS projects.

Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript

#64

Post by PolCPP »

Zelphyr wrote: post #38

In my experience, projects like NativeScript are ideal for prototyping but they start to show their warts pretty quickly once you build anything more than that or a basic CRUD app. I personally enjoyed NativeScript when I used it a couple of years ago but, then again, I really was only using it for building prototypes.

Actually i think RN would be better for that, NS has a lot of small quirks.

Tbh when you get used to those quirks NS can work pretty well.

But to be honest i think that a big part of Nativescript's future will be related to that new ionic integration. Having real web apps with native API access from JS should be awesome.

Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript

#65

Post by codeptualize »

Haven't used NativeScript, also see no reason to try it. How is that even going to work? Have docs/examples/q&a for idk how many frameworks?

I'm still betting on React Native for cross platform development.

It's productive, decently stable, well documented and very good web support with React Native Web. Updating stuff can be incredibly painful, but that's just a couple of days of suffering every now and then. If Microsoft continues React Native Windows & Mac OS it will be quite cool.

Flutter is a very interesting idea and I hope it will become a decent option for the native side of things, but the web story... reminds me a bit of Flash: very easy to build "cool" stuff but with tons of issues. Also not sure about Dart and I don't really trust Google to keep supporting it. I also feel there is a gap between the marketing and the current reality. Let's see, if they manage to fix the web and other issues it could be really awesome.

Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript

#66

Post by starik36 »

gagege wrote: post #60
starik36 wrote: post #31

This was the biggest mistake All the issues that are brought up the article could have been avoided by doing a simple proof of concept demo. We are about to rebuild our Android app in Flutter Spend a week doing a proof of concept first, so we don't have to read this in six months time.

You don't even need to do that! 6 years ago, I was exploring cross-platform mobile options (RN wasn't available for Android yet, also it was brand new and not to be trusted. It turned out OK in the end though.) and Native Script was one of the options I looked at. A couple things instantly made me reject it. 1) The official demo apps were slow and janky. (hmm, reminds me of Flutter. I don't think these guys will be m…

That was probably the right call on your part. Though if someone was insisting on a single code base to save money, I'd probably go with Xamarin because if the framework doesn't supply what you want, you can always drop down and code against the native toolkit.

Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript

#67

Post by hultner »

schmorptron wrote: post #58
hultner wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like AngularJS (which is an entirely different framework then modern angular)

Hahaha, that was before my time, so no idea. But I was just guessing based on flutter being open source. Guess taking over a huge codebase from an entirely different team who was being paid for it full time isn't feasible even in the slightest?

After been bitten by Google’s “graveware” one time to many I don’t invest heavily into their ecosystems anymore. And in my experience the projects are either abandoned or fizzling into obscurity once Google pulls the plug even if an open source community could technically fork it and take over. But in reality usually people rather go on the next shiny thing instead.

Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript

#68

Post by codeptualize »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #44
coldtea wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The message I'm getting from Google is that flutter is the future and will get more support eventually. Google has said the same thing for tons of things, and then stop caring for them and supporting them. Including Dart as a JS alternative, the very same technology now relegated to Flutter backend.

Right. Google has a long history of scrapping major projects the moment it becomes convenient, even products that have millions of active users (Reader, Wave, Plus....). I would think long and hard before betting my company on any Google product. Are there many third-party contributors to flutter? If so, that would make me feel a little more confident. If it's all (or almost all) Google staff, yeah... no. Wouldn't go…

I still miss Google Inbox, such a great product. They just killed it for no good reason. Really sad.

Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript

#69

Post by karmakaze »

JamesSwift wrote: post #8
isaiahg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The message I'm getting from Google is that flutter is the future and will get more support eventually. You can also see it in their fuchsia os which is heavily focused on the ecosystem.

There is absolutely no way flutter unseats java/kotlin unless it abandons dart and adopts kotlin as its language. Its much more likely that flutter gets absorbed in some way by the android ecosystem.

Flutter does away with all the idiosyncrasies of the many Android APIs that differences between Dart and Kotlin seem relatively superficial.

Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript

#70

Post by natenthe »

dkarl wrote: post #21
natenthe wrote: post #9

This post is on point. I spent a good amount of time working on multiple NativeScript apps (NS with Angular and NS with Vue) and can attest that the documentation is not good enough and that there are serious bugs that are pointed out and never fixed or addressed. I will say that open-source is a good thing to do and that they are not solving an easy problem - developing native mobile apps with multiple JS frameworks…

> marketing their software as production ready, easy-to-use, and working out of the box while it being the exact opposite I stuck my nose into NativeScript years ago and turned right around because of the disconcertingly large gap between the slick experience promised by the project web site and the rough edges reported by people trying to use it. Presenting your project as a polished solution when it still has a ton…

Totally agree.
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