Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

geekcoder.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 96 posts

Re: Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

#51

Post by vbezhenar »

posabsolute wrote: post #43
mahouse wrote: post #17

This is a very bad article. The real problems with Cordova are: * Core functionality is broken between releases. If you ask in the IRC support channel, they will even tell you not to update if things work well! What if I need a new feature? * Documentation is absurdly horrible or even plain wrong. I have been told several times to refer to the source code to find out how something works. * If you face any problem, ch…

I think it is also a question of ressources, I built a pretty good backbone app with cordova, I would say that you can get 90% there ( https://www.cakemail.com/mobile ). The question is also what can you afford. Can you afford to have 2 ios & 2 android devs? Can you afford to build 2 times all the UI features, etc. For a small company, small budgets, if you have strong front-end devs & designers you are probably goin…

For basic application there's no need for very deep knowledge of the platform, so you can find people who know iOS and Android equally well and just write two different apps. As Cordova might introduce more problems than advantages, writing two identical apps might actually be faster, if app is not that huge.

And native fast responsive app with smooth animations might earn you more, than HTML container.

I wrote a simple game using cordova and I won't do it again. HTML+CSS+JS just not suited for mobile app development (I didn't try react native, those guys might change the game). Either you use frameworks and everything is just bad or use vanilla JS and everything might work, but you have to write a lots of spaghetti-code and device support might be limited.

The real unmatched benefit of using cordova (or any other webview) is the ability to deliver updates for your app without bothering with App Store moderation.

Re: Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

#52

Post by RoboSeldon »

0x0 wrote: post #28
AshleysBrain wrote: post #13

On performance, the new WKWebView on iOS (with Nitro JS + GPU rendering, including WebGL), and the Chromium webview on Android 5.0+ (or Crosswalk for Android 4.0+, similar features all round), radically changes the performance story. It's almost identical to the system browsers now. Facebook's comments about HTML5 were back in the dark ages when the webviews generally used horribly slow software rendering and didn't…

Does WKWebView work with file:/// urls needed by Cordova?

Last time I checked (a few months ago) you couldn't use file:/// with a WKWebView at least on iOS8. Apparently, latest iOS9 beta allows you to load a local file.

Re: Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

#53

Post by pjmlp »

jorgt wrote: post #11

There's a use case for everything. I for one am not wasting resources creating and maintaining two versions of fairly simple applications in a corporate BYO environment, like the one I'm working in. There are plenty of convenient and easy to use frameworks out there that make positioning and screen creation just as straight forward as Xcode or the android development tools. Actually, I always find it a bit surprising…

> Actually, I always find it a bit surprising Cordova doesn't have more competition.

You mean Xamarin, Qt?

Re: Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

#54

Post by pjmlp »

posabsolute wrote: post #43
mahouse wrote: post #17

This is a very bad article. The real problems with Cordova are: * Core functionality is broken between releases. If you ask in the IRC support channel, they will even tell you not to update if things work well! What if I need a new feature? * Documentation is absurdly horrible or even plain wrong. I have been told several times to refer to the source code to find out how something works. * If you face any problem, ch…

I think it is also a question of ressources, I built a pretty good backbone app with cordova, I would say that you can get 90% there ( https://www.cakemail.com/mobile ). The question is also what can you afford. Can you afford to have 2 ios & 2 android devs? Can you afford to build 2 times all the UI features, etc. For a small company, small budgets, if you have strong front-end devs & designers you are probably goin…

You can get the same with Xamarin, Qt and similar tools that offer a better native integration than a web view.

Even if I have to code native like widgets in QML, it is surely way better than hacking around the DOM.

Re: Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

#55

Post by deutronium »

colinramsay wrote: post #49
deutronium wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking to use something like Cordova to develop a fairly simple app for both Android and ios, so far it looks like React is for Mac only, looking at https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started... ? Edit: It looks like i'm missing something as I can see Android apps built with it on http://www.reactnative.com/built-with-react-native/

That's React Native, not standard React for the Web. http://facebook.github.io/react/

Ah gotcha, looks like Android support is coming to React Native soon, fingers crossed

Re: Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

#56

Post by kriro »

deutronium wrote: post #31
joshcrowder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would of made for a much better article. I couldn't agree more! I'm currently working on a Hybrid React app, performance issues aside the real issue is documentation and support. As soon as you are beyond a basic web app wrapped in a container you realise quickly Corodova will always be a second class citizen. On a more positive note React Native ( https://facebook.github.io/react-native/ ) is mind blowingly ama…

I'm looking to use something like Cordova to develop a fairly simple app for both Android and ios, so far it looks like React is for Mac only, looking at https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started... ? Edit: It looks like i'm missing something as I can see Android apps built with it on http://www.reactnative.com/built-with-react-native/

There's also http://reapp.io/ It can produce apps that run on Android but last time I checked the documentation was pretty iOS centric.

Re: Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

#57

Post by pjmlp »

andresmanz wrote: post #23

I tried Cordova three weeks ago, on my Nexus 10 (Android 5.1.1). I wanted to have a native UI, so I tested angular-material and Polymer. I wasn't too happy with the result, due to stuttering animations kind of ruining the UX. Having a shared C++ code base and the respective native UI code works perfectly fine for me, so I wouldn't use Cordova again. I don't see why I should. I'm just as productive there as I am with…

I do the same approach for my mobile OS hobby coding, between Android and WP.

I guess C++ scares the web devs to go native and prefer to stay in their little sandbox.

Also tried to play around with Qt, but got disappointed that their story is more about bringing C++ apps into mobile not much the license, than a full cross-platform support like Xamarin. Even the new 5.5. still requires a lot of manually wrapping code across all mobile OSes.

However if I would be doing this commercially, Xamarin might be the way to go, as I wouldn't be willing to write glue code all the time.

Re: Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

#58

Post by pjmlp »

bigiain wrote: post #12

Hmmm, I note in his closing para: "Facebook wrote a good article when they have decided to switch from a web app to a native one." A three year old blog post from Facebook. Now the circle has turned with React and React Native…

So full circle that Facebook went C++ with their latest app.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2935408/app-development...

Re: Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

#59

Post by posabsolute »

vbezhenar wrote: post #51
posabsolute wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is also a question of ressources, I built a pretty good backbone app with cordova, I would say that you can get 90% there ( https://www.cakemail.com/mobile ). The question is also what can you afford. Can you afford to have 2 ios & 2 android devs? Can you afford to build 2 times all the UI features, etc. For a small company, small budgets, if you have strong front-end devs & designers you are probably goin…

For basic application there's no need for very deep knowledge of the platform, so you can find people who know iOS and Android equally well and just write two different apps. As Cordova might introduce more problems than advantages, writing two identical apps might actually be faster, if app is not that huge. And native fast responsive app with smooth animations might earn you more, than HTML container. I wrote a sim…

You seems to only think about consumer apps, there is a lot of companies doing b2b. I agree that for games cordova is a very poor choice.

Unfortunately I can't agree that you can easily find easily good IOS & Android devs, I'm sure that some that can do it out there, but generally one platform always suffers more.

Has for Cordova issues, from my experience, nothing was so atrocious that writing 2 apps would have been faster.

"Either you use frameworks and everything is just bad or use vanilla JS and everything might work"

I think you might be thinking about games saying that, again I can't agree, if you don't understand what your framework does in your back that's another thing, but you can easily write optimized code when you control your render.

For example Ionic is a very good mobile UI framework for angular. It however wont save you if you start adding random things to the DOM while doing an animation.

Re: Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

#60

Post by Spoom »

gpmcadam wrote: post #38
0x0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does WKWebView work with file:/// urls needed by Cordova?

Is there a reason they don't ship with a simple web server to server out the static files, similar to `python -m SimpleHTTPServer`?

The Android Cordova platform used to do this by including OkHttp but they moved away from that because it's now unnecessary.
Post reply on HN