/dadjokes-mobile

Trying out stuff

Primary LanguageC++

Summary

All three solutions provide similar UI building experience of using building blocks (Widgets, Components, Xml) to put together a View heirarchy.

App Features

  • Simple tab navigation

    • Home - Fetch dadJoke from Dadjoke API
    • History - shows a list of past dadJoke item(s)

  • Material Icon for tab images

Home

Measurement

General categories of how I would score each framework based on my experience

  • Ease of getting started (boilerplate code, documentation, technical requirements)
  • Developer support (open source, community, documentation)
  • Developer experience (native support, debugging, flexibility)

TODO:

  • Performance comparison
  • App artifacts size

Summary

Flutter

Personal Ratings

See the README for more details

Ease of getting started:

  • Flutter provides great onboarding experience with the CLI tooling
  • Noticeably faster to setup than ReactNative and Xamarin projects

Developer Support:

  • There's a lot of activity in the community, comparable to the React Native community.
  • Official documentations are very thorough.
  • Has good open source libs to use.

Developer Experience:

  • Developer docs are very detailed and thorough.
  • Pre-packaged debugging tool is very intuitive and easy to understand
  • Some widgets provides out of the box support for complex functionality
  • Provides great typing system that prevents runtime error

React Native (Expo)

  • Language: Javascript/Typescript
  • Framework: React
  • Package manager: npm/yarn
  • Common design pattern: Redux

Xamarin Forms

  • Language: C#/F#
  • Framework: .NET
  • Package manager: Nuget
  • Common design pattern: MVVM

Personal Ratings

See the README for more details

Ease of getting started:

  • Forced to use Visual Studio IDE. Auto imports felt a bit off at times.
  • Boilerplate code wasn't able to be executed right away
    • Forced to have latest XCode version (not backwards compatible friendly)

Developer Support:

  • Official documentation was very basic
  • A lot of the community posts and questions are outdated
  • Limited amount of open source plugins
  • Very dependent on Xamarin team to stay up to date with platform changes

Developer Experience:

  • Great MVVM support
  • Very basic documentation and little to no code documentation.
  • Hot reloading only works with XAML changes