Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by kllrnohj » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

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…

> 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 have JIT for Javascript on iOS.

Incorrect at least as far as Android goes. Android's WebView literally was the system browser until Chrome was released complete with the JIT since Froyo (V8) and hardware rendering since Honeycomb. And the first several versions of Chrome on Android had much worse performance than the old WebView did.

This aside the bulk of HTML content is still software-rendered. It's software-rendered into tiles which are then GPU composited. It's a different story if you use , but at that point you aren't gaining much by paying the browser tax so why not just drop to C++ and write GLES directly and get like 10x the performance?

That aside while there have been improvements in JavaScript performance, HTML/CSS & rendering performance really has not improved much if at all over the years. Browsers are still dreadfully slow to actually produce pixels compared to any other UI toolkit.

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

#92

Post by MichaelCrawford » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 8:48 PM UTC

Adirael wrote: post #9

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #5

I dont know from Cordova but a former employer bet the far on Solr without evaluating in any way. When I tried a search for solr sucks I got 600,000 hits. No one ever answered my questions on stackoverflow.

Solr and Cordova are on different realms, I don't see how that's relevant in this discussion. FWIW I've used Solr a lot and it's great for faceting and geometric search.

they are both apache projects.

I have used many apache codebases, all the others were excellent. ai expect my former employer chose solr because of thevapache foundation's great reputation. I looked forward to using it and so was completely dumbfounded by its poor quality.

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

#93

Post by MichaelCrawford » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 8:49 PM UTC

matwood wrote: post #10

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #5

I dont know from Cordova but a former employer bet the far on Solr without evaluating in any way. When I tried a search for solr sucks I got 600,000 hits. No one ever answered my questions on stackoverflow.

I searched for solr sucks and got 20k hits. Not here to defend solr specifically, but every tool has trade offs. Solr is popular and there is a lot of documentation, so it is not a bad choice for a document search database. Now, picking solr without understanding a document database and its tradeoffs is a problem, but not solrs.

I tried that search in june 2013.

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

#94

Post by m_fayer » Mon, Jul 06, 2015, 9:40 PM UTC

_pmf_ wrote: post #62

Can anyone using Xamarin chime in as to whether the situation there is better?

The downside of xamarin is slightly unstable tooling, the occasional regression, and headaches associated with using native oss libs, though it is very much possible. And of course price.

On the other hand, native-equivalent performance is no joke and c#/f# are great languages. Xamarin comes with some very sophisticated stuff like databinding, and high-level concurrency like rx, async/await, and akka.net which can really be a boon for performance, especially compared with js's comparatively meager concurrency options.

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

#95

Post by lewisl9029 » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 1:41 AM UTC

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…

> Yes obviously a Cordova app does not look native. It's not native and it will never be. Period.

You can get pretty close to looking native with a framework like Ionic: http://showcase.ionicframework.com/

Of course, it's not native, so there are going to be corner cases where things don't look quite the same, but I'd be hesitant to make such an absolute statement about the future when you can already get so close today.

Performance and compatibility issues for Cordova apps can be often traced back to outdated webviews, and you can resolve much of it by embedding an up-to-date webview with your app: https://crosswalk-project.org/

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

#96

Post by fbender » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 9:26 AM UTC

thomasfoster96 wrote: post #21

SchizoDuckie wrote: post #14

FUD. Ever heard of WebSQL for storing your data? After 10 months, you should have been able to work around nearly anything you mention in your article.

WebSQL is pretty much dead (which is unfortunate, and you should direct stern words towards Mozilla), so relying on that would be pretty risky.

There's IndexedDB. Both Mozilla and Microsoft opposed on standardizing on a specific implementation of an SQL database (sqlite v2), and rightly so. There's loads of commentary/rationale on this issue on the web, so I won't re-iterate it here.

iOS has IndexedDB since v8.0 though the implementation is poor. I don't know if they've fixed it in any 8.x release. However, you're (mostly) not using IndexedDB directly anyway but a storage library, which supports IndexedDB, WebSQL and maybe localstorage as a fallback (e.g. localForage[1] for a simple key-value DB).

[1] https://mozilla.github.io/localForage/