where can I find detailed comparisons of the trade-offs in using one or the other?
I presume react native will use the iOS and Android SDKs which will yield better operability, performance, support, and features. Is this true? Where can I find documentation describing this?
As the heavy lifting is done natively by the browsers when using the OpenTok JS SDK, I would not expect much of a performance difference between the two.
I would consider the target audience and what mix of technologies you are using to build your application to be the important question here.
If your application's primary use-case is for mobile users, perhaps going react-native or even native is probably the way to go.
If your application is primarily web-based and you expect the target audience does not wish to install an app for it, then the OpenTok JS SDK might be the better solution.
Related
I am trying to evaluate whether Xamarin would be a good option for my project. The project is a large, complex app for Android and iOS with a lot of client-server communication. The user interface is a major focus and has to be really fast and smooth. Also, we plan to make large use of UX graphic effects (comparable to the Spotify app).
For now we are planning to go for two separate native apps using Java/Objective-C. However, the possibility of cross-platform code sharing would be very convenient for us of course.
Most opinions I've heard so far say that Xamarin - although far better than HTML5 apps - cannot match the UX of a native app. Also, I tested the following applications made with Xamarin (on Android):
Rdio
MarketWatch
Busch Gardens Discovery Guide
Sqor
Storyo
From my impression, none of them could quite match the speed and smoothness of a good native app.
If our focus is on a top notch user experience, would Xamarin really be a viable option? Can it really match a native UX? I am particularly looking for opinions from developers who have experience with large and complex cross-platform Xamarin applications. A few critical voices would be very helpful.
Thank you a lot!
I'm on the Rdio mobile development team, so I can make some personal reflections from that standpoint.
Xamarin allows you to write native applications in C#. Any slowness, jankiness, ugliness or bad-appiness usually has nothing to do with the Xamarin layer itself.
You save some time being able to share core business logic between your different clients, but you're still writing the UI from scratch, specific to the platform. You're just writing it in C#.
But while you save that time, you're spending it in other ways. All of those SDKs you want to use probably aren't compatible with Xamarin out of the box. You won't be pod install'ing that iOS framework, and you might be reinventing the wheel for handfuls of things. Xamarin takes advantage of the NuGet repo so you have a library of components that handle many of the things most people need (Analytics, Testing, Facebook SDK, JSON parsing, Database, etc etc) but it doesn't cover everything. And it certainly doesn't cover stuff that's out the day of an Apple or Google product announcement.
Any 3rd party code that you do want to import into your project will be done through writing custom bindings. While not usually difficult, it is time consuming. Xamarin has a team of people that specialize in assisting you in this. This fact speaks to the process being messy at times.
So while the slowness, jankiness, ugliness or bad-appiness probably isn't the fault of Xamarin, it might be the fault of you spending time in places you normally wouldn't, or not being able to take advantage of features you normally would. If that 3rd party partner SDK is giving you problems, your troubleshooting may take twice as long because there's a layer that you don't control.
UI is a wash. You're writing it from scratch anyway.
Business logic is shared. Depending on the app that might be a win if you architect your application to take advantage of it.
Compatibility / bleeding edge ability will be lacking. That might not matter to you at all, or you might be the person wanting to take advantage of that hot new API in the next OS release the day it's announced.
My personal thought, without knowing specifics, is if you want to build an application that you plan on being around years from now, and that will take advantage of the latest and greatest, I'd tell you to write natively for each platform. Unless you can really see huge gains in sharing that business logic the upfront gains are minimal. Or if you really like C#.
Xamarin uses native controls. So you design a fully native UI per platform. The users can't see that your App is made with Xamarin or Java/Objective-C.
There are sometimes performance issues in conjunction with the platform independent UI wrapper Xamarin.Forms. But you're not forced to use it. When you have still performance issues in your Xamarin.Android or Xamarin.iOS app then you produce them in your code.
There are benchmark results for Android apps comparing Xamarin.Android and Java apps: Does anyone have benchmarks (code & results) comparing performance of Android apps written in Xamarin C# and Java?
As you can see Xamarin's internal performance became better and better over the time.
Conclusion: Yes, you can write smooth native Apps using Xamarin.
I have seen both sites, which are CloudKit and parse, also i have been read the articles as well about the comparison. Still i am not clear of that which is the best backend platform for mobile apps. I am looking forward your answer only for mobile platforms, it can be android or IOS.
Also i need to know about the performance and capacity allocation on each level.
First and foremost CloudKit don't quite support cross-platform. It generally only works with iOS. On the other hand, Parse support cross-platform. From your question, you seem to want to go for both iOS and Android. So for me to answer this question I would say Parse.
For deeper details, this link should tell all you need to know.
UPDATE:
ClouldKit now supports web services API.
I'm trying to figure out a way to create a real-time chatting app with Xamarin and some kind of backend technology. How can I do it?
I have a better solution. The above-mentioned technologies(buddy SDK & SignalR) will require you to integrate and handle everything by your self. Instead, you can go for CometChat SDK, which has real-time chat along with Audio/Video chat functionalities. Also, you can use its ready-made UI inside your application. It is the easiest & quickest way for you to make a real-time chatting system. For more information on CometChat you can refer to the following link:
https://developer.cometchat.com/docs/xamarin-forms-quick-start
As mentioned by ChristiaanV, SignalR is the way to go.
The Performance is great with Xamarin, we delivered more than 150k messages within 2 hours without any problems regarding the connection.
With Azure Mobile App and ServiceBus, you can easily scale out your backend, as described here http://www.asp.net/signalr/overview/performance/scaleout-with-windows-azure-service-bus
Have a look at SignalR, it's a good and easy to use framework to do realtime 'things'. They also have a Xamarin Component which is free to use.
https://github.com/SignalR/SignalR
http://components.xamarin.com/view/signalr
Please note that I personally don't have experience with using it on mobile devices, so I can't tell you anything about how it's performing battery / performance wise.
I have some knowledge of basic PHP developing however right now I am thinking about developing a phone app. I do however have a bit of a conundrum in that I love WP7 and I have so many ideas for features which can't be done on iOS and Android, however at the same time I am completely aware that my target users (filmmakers) generally have iOS or android phones.
Is there a way I can develop the app, which I will get a developer to do rather than myself, with WP7 as the lead platform and then make a relatively simple conversion to the other platforms or do apps generally have to be completely reworked for each platform?
Also, just to though it out there, any idea of where to go to find a freelance app developer?
Thanks
James
I think you have a few options, but the first question I would have is: where comes the data from. Are you the owner of the data, and do you already have a datasource from where you can get the data from? If not I would suggest take some time to write a decent 'backend' from which the different platforms easily can get the data from.
Also all different platforms have their own pro/cons which you cannot share that easily. If you build a WP7 app in silverlight/xna, you cannot directly port it to a ios/android variant, also functionality will probably look/react different. You will need different solutions foreach platform with this approach.
Another option would be to use an platform like phonegap which can create a solution that will work on multiple platforms. (It uses HTML5 to get it work on the different platforms)
Build your app on iOS and android first, and when you have an app to base WP7 development then contact a developer that has made similar apps to yours.
I looked already and couldn't find anything good.
So a question is, are there any good web frameworks that would allow to easily develop GUI for the majority of high end phones? By this I mean
It would have to work "the same" on majority of high end phones (forget the low cost ones)
It would have to simplify the development and hide the ugly details from developer
Clear design and good documentation. Also some stability on the market.
The focus is on good looking and easy to make GUI. Javascript is only a plus.
So basically I am looking for something like jQuery or maybe ExtJS for phone development.
EDIT:
It would be a big plus if it could be consumed in Delphi
EDIT 2:
If it was not clear, I am looking for a web base solution that would run in a browser. So the target is HTML output and not native code.
To contribute to the subject. I found a question that has answers to such topic:
iWebkit vs. JQTouch vs. iUI
So there seem to be the following frameworks:
iUI
jQTouch
WebApp.net
iWebKit
Yahoo! Blueprint
JQTouch
PhoneGap
Sencha Touch
jQueryMobile
PhoneGap supports a wide variety of phones but it does so by making native (or interpreted I don't know) code to run on them, so it is a no go for me.
Yahoo! Blueprint supports a lot of phones also, but seems to need a special framework to run on. So also a no go.
jQTouch and WebApp.net look promissing, but they only support webkit based browsers. Yes these are in majority these days probably, but Blackberry for one has non webkit based browser and Blackberry is very important to me.
I will keep looking, in the meantime, don't be shy to contribute ;)
EDIT
Found this wiki about some frameworks. Most are embedded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_phone_web_based_application_framework
EDIT2
I added Sencha Touch (www.sencha.com/products/touch) to the list as it was added after this post was created. They are the former ExtJS and now have the WebKit based mobile solution.
EDIT3
I added jQuery Mobile (http://jquerymobile.com/) to the list as it was added after this post was created.
Sencha Touch seams to be the solution. Since UniGui for Delphi/Lazarus already supports eye catching ExtJS it would be ideal if it extends to Sencha Touch. We will see.
I'm confused, do you want a web framework that runs on the web for phones (like jqTouch), or are you looking for something that will create native apps provides some amount of portability (like MonoTouch/C#)?
lightweight jquery-like alternative that works on android & iphone (& possibly blackberry & winmo) is xui, cfr. http://xuijs.com/documentation and http://github.com/brianleroux/xui.
edit: xui is more about javascript and less about a good looking GUI, so this might not be what you're looking for after all.
http://jquerymobile.com/
... when its released in "Late 2010".