111–120 of 150 posts
Ah finally the Western tech ecosystem has caught up with WeChat/Alipay mini programs. https://developers.weixin.qq.com/miniprogram/en/dev/framewor... China had this DSL for building mobile apps for years. Those these apps are initially embedded inside WeChat/Alipay, there are now frameworks that allow it to run outside, like uniapp. https://en.uniapp.dcloud.io/
"Serve your app as XML" As someone who started his professional career in 2005: All the old is new again.
>as easy as creating a website This strikes me as odd - I have a much easier time making a well-functioning native app (iOS or Android) than the equivalent website. That's not typically a checkmark in the web column for web vs app pros and cons. Unless we're including distribution when we say "creating".
I think it has to be included given how much traffic I see from mobile devs I follow about getting stuck in some review blackhole, running afoul of a TOS or payment rule, etc. Getting the app built is in your control, but getting it to end users has a big dependency on others, potentially. The idea of being able to push code to a server you control and deliver instant updates is appealing.
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I'm curious about the limitations that prevent these apps from writing / caching local data. It doesn't seem like the paradigm would have to change entirely to support that.
There aren't any, with hyperview you actually own the hypermedia client as well as the server and you can write and cache local data in the form of custom extensions you make to it. I think that needs better documentation though.
These things always implement the easiest bit of mobile development (the UI) and then make everything else harder, so it's useless for anything non-trivial.
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this is just not true. even the worst offenders (looking at you, react-router) do not require to "rebuild and relearn everything". What an unnecessary hyperbole.
Maybe not React itself, but the ecosystem as a whole. I can list some of these changes that generated a lot of work from memory: - the move from in-browser JSX compilation to build tools / webpack - the move from class components to functional components and hooks - all the changes related to ES6 classes and modules + build system - server-side components - Flux -> Redux - Redux -> MobX -> Relay -> Redux Toolkit -> C…
React Router changing its API so often felt unnecessary too.
I wouldn't call all of that churn though, as I believe most devs only had to deal with a subset of those. Some who got into React in 2019 could be writing the same kind of code today.
Frontend as whole, on the other hand...
Any "app" framework that isn't offline-first seems broken by default to me. It seems ridiculous to me that client-server architecture is considered the easy thing now. Where did it all go wrong?
I overlooked it at first even though it’s right there on the landing page but this is ultimately still React Native with all the baggage that entails.
I briefly investigated using React Native on a project. Obscure installation and linking process which no one seems to understand exactly, no SPM support on iOS, incomplete documentation that from the start pushes to adopt yet another layer on top (such as Expo, and I suppose Hyperview is now another option)… It felt like I am adopting some rusty legacy software, and not in a good way (more full of quirks than mature…
I overlooked it at first even though it’s right there on the landing page but this is ultimately still React Native with all the baggage that entails.
I briefly investigated using React Native on a project. Obscure installation and linking process which no one seems to understand exactly, no SPM support on iOS, incomplete documentation that from the start pushes to adopt yet another layer on top (such as Expo, and I suppose Hyperview is now another option)… It felt like I am adopting some rusty legacy software, and not in a good way (more full of quirks than mature…
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That’s only true on the surface: if you chose React, you had to rebuild and relearn everything about once every two years. Averages out to about the same workload as following the latest fad. Maybe more, since refactoring legacy code is 10x harder than building from scratch.
this is just not true. even the worst offenders (looking at you, react-router) do not require to "rebuild and relearn everything". What an unnecessary hyperbole.
Besides that, React churn isn't too bad. I have to fix builds, but I don't have to relearn everything about React. Unlike Angular.