What is C and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to C
Java
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere! ...
Python
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best. ...
C#
C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers. ...
Objective-C
Objective-C is a superset of the C programming language and provides object-oriented capabilities and a dynamic runtime. Objective-C inherits the syntax, primitive types, and flow control statements of C and adds syntax for defining classes and methods. It also adds language-level support for object graph management and object literals while providing dynamic typing and binding, deferring many responsibilities until runtime. ...
Rust
Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory. ...
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles. ...
PHP
Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world. ...
HTML5
HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997. ...
C alternatives & related posts
Java
- Great libraries572
- Widely used433
- Excellent tooling396
- Huge amount of documentation available378
- Large pool of developers available328
- Open source197
- Excellent performance192
- Great development150
- Used for android143
- Vast array of 3rd party libraries142
- Compiled Language54
- Used for Web46
- Managed memory42
- Native threads42
- High Performance40
- Statically typed35
- Easy to read31
- Great Community29
- Reliable platform25
- JVM compatibility23
- Sturdy garbage collection22
- Cross Platform Enterprise Integration19
- Universal platform18
- Great Support16
- Good amount of APIs16
- Lots of boilerplate11
- Great ecosystem10
- Backward compatible10
- Everywhere9
- Excellent SDK - JDK7
- Mature language thus stable systems6
- Better than Ruby5
- Portability5
- Cross-platform5
- Static typing5
- Clojure5
- It's Java5
- Old tech4
- Vast Collections Library4
- Most developers favorite3
- Stable platform, which many new languages depend on3
- Long term language3
- Great Structure3
- Best martial for design3
- Used for Android development3
- Testable2
- Javadoc1
- Verbosity29
- NullpointerException23
- Overcomplexity is praised in community culture15
- Nightmare to Write13
- Boiler plate code10
- Classpath hell prior to Java 98
- No REPL6
- No property4
- Code are too long2
- There is not optional parameter2
- Floating-point errors2
- Terrbible compared to Python/Batch Perormence1
- Java's too statically, stronglly, and strictly typed1
- Non-intuitive generic implementation1
- Returning Wildcard Types1
related Java posts











How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:
Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.
Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:
https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/
(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)
Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark
When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.
Python
- Great libraries1.1K
- Readable code922
- Beautiful code814
- Rapid development763
- Large community668
- Open source414
- Elegant375
- Great community264
- Object oriented257
- Dynamic typing206
- Great standard library68
- Very fast51
- Functional programming47
- Scientific computing33
- Easy to learn31
- Great documentation29
- Matlab alternative25
- Productivity22
- Easy to read21
- Simple is better than complex19
- It's the way I think17
- Imperative17
- Very programmer and non-programmer friendly15
- Free14
- Powerful14
- Powerfull language13
- Fast and simple13
- Scripting12
- Machine learning support9
- Explicit is better than implicit9
- Ease of development8
- Unlimited power8
- Import antigravity7
- Clear and easy and powerfull7
- Print "life is short, use python"6
- It's lean and fun to code6
- Great for tooling5
- Fast coding and good for competitions5
- There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious5
- Python has great libraries for data processing5
- High Documented language5
- I love snakes5
- Although practicality beats purity5
- Flat is better than nested5
- Readability counts4
- Multiple Inheritence3
- Complex is better than complicated3
- Lists, tuples, dictionaries3
- Plotting3
- Rapid Prototyping3
- Great for analytics3
- Socially engaged community3
- Beautiful is better than ugly3
- CG industry needs3
- No cruft2
- Easy to learn and use2
- List comprehensions2
- Generators2
- Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules2
- Now is better than never2
- If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad id2
- If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a g2
- Simple and easy to learn2
- Import this2
- Powerful language for AI1
- Because of Netflix1
- Pip install everything1
- Web scraping1
- Better outcome1
- Batteries included1
- Easy to setup and run smooth1
- It is Very easy , simple and will you be love programmi1
- Only one way to do it1
- A-to-Z1
- Many types of collections1
- Flexible and easy1
- Pro0
- Powerful0
- Still divided between python 2 and python 349
- Poor syntax for anonymous functions26
- Performance impact26
- GIL18
- Package management is a mess18
- Too imperative-oriented13
- Hard to understand12
- Dynamic typing10
- Very slow8
- Not everything is expression8
- Indentations matter a lot7
- Explicit self parameter in methods7
- Poor DSL capabilities6
- No anonymous functions6
- Requires C functions for dynamic modules6
- Hard to obfuscate5
- The "lisp style" whitespaces5
- The benevolent-dictator-for-life quit4
- Lack of Syntax Sugar leads to "the pyramid of doom"4
- Threading4
- Fake object-oriented programming4
- Incredibly slow4
- Not suitable for autocomplete3
- Official documentation is unclear.3
- Circular import2
- Training wheels (forced indentation)1
- Meta classes1
related Python posts











How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:
Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.
Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:
https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/
(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)
Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark
Winds 2.0 is an open source Podcast/RSS reader developed by Stream with a core goal to enable a wide range of developers to contribute.
We chose JavaScript because nearly every developer knows or can, at the very least, read JavaScript. With ES6 and Node.js v10.x.x, it’s become a very capable language. Async/Await is powerful and easy to use (Async/Await vs Promises). Babel allows us to experiment with next-generation JavaScript (features that are not in the official JavaScript spec yet). Yarn allows us to consistently install packages quickly (and is filled with tons of new tricks)
We’re using JavaScript for everything – both front and backend. Most of our team is experienced with Go and Python, so Node was not an obvious choice for this app.
Sure... there will be haters who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything remotely positive about JavaScript (there are even rants on Hacker News about Node.js); however, without writing completely in JavaScript, we would not have seen the results we did.
#FrameworksFullStack #Languages
C#
- Cool syntax320
- Great lambda support269
- Great generics support244
- Language integrated query (linq)189
- Extension methods162
- Properties with get/set methods77
- Automatic garbage collection76
- Backed by microsoft70
- Automatic memory management58
- Amaizing Crossplatform Support54
- High performance29
- Beautiful28
- LINQ25
- Great ecosystem of community packages with Nuget22
- Vibrant developer community19
- Dead-simple asynchronous programming with async/await13
- Great readability12
- Strongly typed by default, dynamic typing when needed9
- Productive8
- Visual Studio - Great IDE7
- Easy separation of config/application code7
- Object oriented programming paradigm6
- Open source6
- Events management using delegates5
- OOPS simplified with great syntax5
- Operator overloading5
- Conditional compilation4
- Comprehensive platform libraries3
- Good language to teach OO concepts3
- Great community3
- Organized and clean3
- High-performance3
- Coherent language backed by an extensive CLR3
- Cool3
- Concise syntax, productivity designed2
- Unity2
- Top level code2
- Linq expressions2
- Lovely1
- Interfaces1
- Interfaces0
- Poor x-platform GUI support11
- Closed source6
- Requires DllImportAttribute for getting stuff from unma6
- Fast and secure5
related C# posts











How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:
Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.
Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:
https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/
(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)
Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark
Our first experience with .NET core was when we developed our OSS feature management platform - Tweek (https://github.com/soluto/tweek). We wanted to create a solution that is able to run anywhere (super important for OSS), has excellent performance characteristics and can fit in a multi-container architecture. We decided to implement our rule engine processor in F# , our main service was implemented in C# and other components were built using JavaScript / TypeScript and Go.
Visual Studio Code worked really well for us as well, it worked well with all our polyglot services and the .Net core integration had great cross-platform developer experience (to be fair, F# was a bit trickier) - actually, each of our team members used a different OS (Ubuntu, macos, windows). Our production deployment ran for a time on Docker Swarm until we've decided to adopt Kubernetes with almost seamless migration process.
After our positive experience of running .Net core workloads in containers and developing Tweek's .Net services on non-windows machines, C# had gained back some of its popularity (originally lost to Node.js), and other teams have been using it for developing microservices, k8s sidecars (like https://github.com/Soluto/airbag), cli tools, serverless functions and other projects...
Objective-C
- Ios212
- Xcode115
- Backed by apple62
- Osx46
- Interface builder40
- Good old fashioned ooe with a modern twist10
- Goober, please2
- Object-oriented1
- Handles well null values (no NullPointerExceptions)1
- UNREADABLE1
related Objective-C posts
Excerpts from how we developed (and subsequently open sourced) Uber's cross-platform mobile architecture framework, RIBs , going from Objective-C to Swift in the process for iOS: https://github.com/uber/RIBs
Uber’s new application architecture (RIBs) extensively uses protocols to keep its various components decoupled and testable. We used this architecture for the first time in our new rider application and moved our primary language from Objective-C to Swift. Since Swift is a very static language, unit testing became problematic. Dynamic languages have good frameworks to build test mocks, stubs, or stand-ins by dynamically creating or modifying existing concrete classes.
Needless to say, we were not very excited about the additional complexity of manually writing and maintaining mock implementations for each of our thousands of protocols.
The information required to generate mock classes already exists in the Swift protocol. For Uber’s use case, we set out to create tooling that would let engineers automatically generate test mocks for any protocol they wanted by simply annotating them.
The iOS codebase for our rider application alone incorporates around 1,500 of these generated mocks. Without our code generation tool, all of these would have to be written and maintained by hand, which would have made testing much more time-intensive. Auto-generated mocks have contributed a lot to the unit test coverage that we have today.
We built these code generation tools ourselves for a number of reasons, including that there weren’t many open source tools available at the time we started our effort. Today, there are some great open source tools to generate resource accessors, like SwiftGen. And Sourcery can help you with generic code generation needs:
https://eng.uber.com/code-generation/ https://eng.uber.com/driver-app-ribs-architecture/
(GitHub : https://github.com/uber/RIBs )
Greetings everyone. I ran a design studio for 8 years in which we designed mobile and web apps. I also lead development teams when our client asked us to carry out the development of the projects. I always had an interest in learning to code to help me understand what is going on on the dev side and also build small apps as a hobby. I tried several times to get on a learning path, but challenges always put me down, so I quit after a couple of weeks. I tried JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Objective-C.
Now I am retrying to teach myself Swift and especially SwiftUI for more than a month, and It's been going well so far. I want to build my own small apps, and I'm not focused on getting hired as a developer. I want to ask if it's the right language to start learning to program or should I learn something else first as a foundation. I'm currently taking a 100 days of code challenge and reading the Swift 5.3 PDF if I want to get more information on a specific topic. It feels like none of the stuff is sticking, but I'm not sure if it's the way it goes or my approach is wrong.
I would appreciate any kind of guidance. Thanks
- Guaranteed memory safety121
- Fast108
- Open source71
- Minimal runtime65
- Pattern matching56
- Type inference52
- Algebraic data types50
- Concurrent45
- Efficient C bindings42
- Practical37
- Best advances in languages in 20 years29
- Safe, fast, easy + friendly community21
- Fix for C/C++21
- Closures17
- Stablity16
- Zero-cost abstractions15
- Extensive compiler checks13
- Great community11
- No Garbage Collection8
- No NULL type8
- Completely cross platform: Windows, Linux, Android7
- Super fast7
- Async/await7
- Safety no runtime crashes6
- Great documentations6
- High performance5
- High-performance5
- Fearless concurrency5
- Guaranteed thread data race safety5
- RLS provides great IDE support5
- Generics5
- Painless dependency management4
- Prevents data races4
- Macros4
- Compiler can generate Webassembly4
- Easy Deployment4
- Helpful compiler3
- Support on Other Languages1
- Hard to learn21
- Ownership learning curve20
- Unfriendly, verbose syntax7
- Variable shadowing3
- Many type operations make it difficult to follow2
- High size of builded executable2
- No jobs2
related Rust posts
Sentry's event processing pipeline, which is responsible for handling all of the ingested event data that makes it through to our offline task processing, is written primarily in Python.
For particularly intense code paths, like our source map processing pipeline, we have begun re-writing those bits in Rust. Rust’s lack of garbage collection makes it a particularly convenient language for embedding in Python. It allows us to easily build a Python extension where all memory is managed from the Python side (if the Python wrapper gets collected by the Python GC we clean up the Rust object as well).
In our company we have think a lot about languages that we're willing to use, there we have considering Java, Python and C++ . All of there languages are old and well developed at fact but that's not ideology of araclx. We've choose a edge technologies such as Node.js , Rust , Kotlin and Go as our programming languages which is some kind of fun. Node.js is one of biggest trends of 2019, same for Go. We want to grow in our company with growth of languages we have choose, and probably when we would choose Java that would be almost impossible because larger languages move on today's market slower, and cannot have big changes.
JavaScript
- Can be used on frontend/backend1.6K
- It's everywhere1.5K
- Lots of great frameworks1.1K
- Fast880
- Light weight729
- Flexible408
- You can't get a device today that doesn't run js374
- Non-blocking i/o278
- Ubiquitousness227
- Expressive182
- Extended functionality to web pages44
- Relatively easy language40
- Executed on the client side37
- Relatively fast to the end user22
- Pure Javascript18
- Functional programming13
- Async6
- Full-stack4
- Because I love functions4
- Setup is easy4
- JavaScript is the New PHP4
- Like it or not, JS is part of the web standard3
- Can be used in backend, frontend and DB3
- Its everywhere3
- Expansive community3
- Future Language of The Web3
- Evolution of C2
- For the good parts2
- Love-hate relationship2
- Popularized Class-Less Architecture & Lambdas2
- Everyone use it2
- Easy to hire developers2
- Supports lambdas and closures2
- Versitile1
- Powerful1
- 1.6K Can be used on frontend/backend1
- Can be used both as frontend and backend as well1
- Agile, packages simple to use1
- Can be used on frontend/backend/Mobile/create PRO Ui1
- No need to use PHP1
- It's fun1
- Its fun and fast1
- Most Popular Language in the World1
- Hard not to use1
- Stockholm Syndrome1
- Photoshop has 3 JS runtimes built in1
- Promise relationship1
- It let's me use Babel & Typescript1
- Function expressions are useful for callbacks1
- Scope manipulation1
- What to add1
- Clojurescript1
- Client processing1
- Everywhere1
- Only Programming language on browser1
- Nice1
- Client side JS uses the visitors CPU to save Server Res0
- Because it is so simple and lightweight0
- Easy to make something0
- Easy0
- A constant moving target, too much churn21
- Horribly inconsistent20
- Javascript is the New PHP13
- No ability to monitor memory utilitization8
- Shows Zero output in case of ANY error5
- Can be ugly4
- Thinks strange results are better than errors3
- No GitHub1
related JavaScript posts
Oof. I have truly hated JavaScript for a long time. Like, for over twenty years now. Like, since the Clinton administration. It's always been a nightmare to deal with all of the aspects of that silly language.
But wowza, things have changed. Tooling is just way, way better. I'm primarily web-oriented, and using React and Apollo together the past few years really opened my eyes to building rich apps. And I deeply apologize for using the phrase rich apps; I don't think I've ever said such Enterprisey words before.
But yeah, things are different now. I still love Rails, and still use it for a lot of apps I build. But it's that silly rich apps phrase that's the problem. Users have way more comprehensive expectations than they did even five years ago, and the JS community does a good job at building tools and tech that tackle the problems of making heavy, complicated UI and frontend work.
Obviously there's a lot of things happening here, so just saying "JavaScript isn't terrible" might encompass a huge amount of libraries and frameworks. But if you're like me, yeah, give things another shot- I'm somehow not hating on JavaScript anymore and... gulp... I kinda love it.











How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:
Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.
Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:
https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/
(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)
Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark
PHP
- Large community938
- Open source801
- Easy deployment755
- Great frameworks480
- The best glue on the web384
- Continual improvements231
- Good old web180
- Web foundation141
- Community packages130
- Tool support123
- Used by wordpress31
- Excellent documentation30
- Used by Facebook25
- Because of Symfony23
- Dynamic Language17
- Awesome Language and easy to implement14
- Cheap hosting12
- Very powerful web language12
- Fast development12
- Flexibility, syntax, extensibility9
- Composer9
- Because of Laravel9
- Easy to learn8
- Worst popularity quality ratio7
- Fastestest Time to Version 1.0 Deployments7
- Short development lead times7
- Readable Code7
- Easiest deployment7
- Fast6
- Most of the web uses it6
- Faster then ever6
- Open source and large community5
- Simple, flexible yet Scalable4
- Easy to use and learn4
- I have no choice :(4
- Cheap to own4
- Easy to learn, a big community, lot of frameworks4
- Large community, easy setup, easy deployment, framework3
- Has the best ecommerce(Magento,Prestashop,Opencart,etc)3
- Is like one zip of air3
- Open source and great framework3
- Great developer experience3
- Walk away2
- Fault tolerance2
- FFI2
- Interpreted at the run time2
- Great flexibility. From fast prototyping to large apps2
- Used by STOMT2
- Hard not to use2
- Safe the planet2
- So easy to learn, good practices are hard to find19
- Inconsistent API16
- Fragmented community8
- Not secure5
- No routing system2
- Hard to debug1
- Old1
related PHP posts
When I joined NYT there was already broad dissatisfaction with the LAMP (Linux Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP) Stack and the front end framework, in particular. So, I wasn't passing judgment on it. I mean, LAMP's fine, you can do good work in LAMP. It's a little dated at this point, but it's not ... I didn't want to rip it out for its own sake, but everyone else was like, "We don't like this, it's really inflexible." And I remember from being outside the company when that was called MIT FIVE when it had launched. And been observing it from the outside, and I was like, you guys took so long to do that and you did it so carefully, and yet you're not happy with your decisions. Why is that? That was more the impetus. If we're going to do this again, how are we going to do it in a way that we're gonna get a better result?
So we're moving quickly away from LAMP, I would say. So, right now, the new front end is React based and using Apollo. And we've been in a long, protracted, gradual rollout of the core experiences.
React is now talking to GraphQL as a primary API. There's a Node.js back end, to the front end, which is mainly for server-side rendering, as well.
Behind there, the main repository for the GraphQL server is a big table repository, that we call Bodega because it's a convenience store. And that reads off of a Kafka pipeline.
















Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:
- Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
- npm as package manager
- NestJS as Node.js framework
- TypeScript as programming language
- ExpressJS as web server
- Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
- Postman as a tool for API development
- TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
- JSON Web Token for access token management
The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:
- Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
- Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
- A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
- Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
- New doctype442
- Local storage386
- Canvas334
- Semantic header and footer284
- Video element237
- Geolocation119
- Form autofocus104
- Email inputs98
- Editable content84
- Application caches79
- Cleaner Code8
- Easy to use6
- Semantical4
- Websockets3
- Modern3
- Easy3
- Content focused2
- Compatible2
- Better2
- Portability2
- Audio element2
- Semantic Header and Footer, Geolocation, New Doctype2
related HTML5 posts














I needed to choose a full stack of tools for cross platform mobile application design & development. After much research and trying different tools, these are what I came up with that work for me today:
For the client coding I chose Framework7 because of its performance, easy learning curve, and very well designed, beautiful UI widgets. I think it's perfect for solo development or small teams. I didn't like React Native. It felt heavy to me and rigid. Framework7 allows the use of #CSS3, which I think is the best technology to come out of the #WWW movement. No other tech has been able to allow designers and developers to develop such flexible, high performance, customisable user interface elements that are highly responsive and hardware accelerated before. Now #CSS3 includes variables and flexboxes it is truly a powerful language and there is no longer a need for preprocessors such as #SCSS / #Sass / #less. React Native contains a very limited interpretation of #CSS3 which I found very frustrating after using #CSS3 for some years already and knowing its powerful features. The other very nice feature of Framework7 is that you can even build for the browser if you want your app to be available for desktop web browsers. The latest release also includes the ability to build for #Electron so you can have MacOS, Windows and Linux desktop apps. This is not possible with React Native yet.
Framework7 runs on top of Apache Cordova. Cordova and webviews have been slated as being slow in the past. Having a game developer background I found the tweeks to make it run as smooth as silk. One of those tweeks is to use WKWebView. Another important one was using srcset on images.
I use #Template7 for the for the templating system which is a no-nonsense mobile-centric #HandleBars style extensible templating system. It's easy to write custom helpers for, is fast and has a small footprint. I'm not forced into a new paradigm or learning some new syntax. It operates with standard JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS 3. It's written by the developer of Framework7 and so dovetails with it as expected.
I configured TypeScript to work with the latest version of Framework7. I consider TypeScript to be one of the best creations to come out of Microsoft in some time. They must have an amazing team working on it. It's very powerful and flexible. It helps you catch a lot of bugs and also provides code completion in supporting IDEs. So for my IDE I use Visual Studio Code which is a blazingly fast and silky smooth editor that integrates seamlessly with TypeScript for the ultimate type checking setup (both products are produced by Microsoft).
I use Webpack and Babel to compile the JavaScript. TypeScript can compile to JavaScript directly but Babel offers a few more options and polyfills so you can use the latest (and even prerelease) JavaScript features today and compile to be backwards compatible with virtually any browser. My favorite recent addition is "optional chaining" which greatly simplifies and increases readability of a number of sections of my code dealing with getting and setting data in nested objects.
I use some Ruby scripts to process images with ImageMagick and pngquant to optimise for size and even auto insert responsive image code into the HTML5. Ruby is the ultimate cross platform scripting language. Even as your scripts become large, Ruby allows you to refactor your code easily and make it Object Oriented if necessary. I find it the quickest and easiest way to maintain certain aspects of my build process.
For the user interface design and prototyping I use Figma. Figma has an almost identical user interface to #Sketch but has the added advantage of being cross platform (MacOS and Windows). Its real-time collaboration features are outstanding and I use them a often as I work mostly on remote projects. Clients can collaborate in real-time and see changes I make as I make them. The clickable prototyping features in Figma are also very well designed and mean I can send clickable prototypes to clients to try user interface updates as they are made and get immediate feedback. I'm currently also evaluating the latest version of #AdobeXD as an alternative to Figma as it has the very cool auto-animate feature. It doesn't have real-time collaboration yet, but I heard it is proposed for 2019.
For the UI icons I use Font Awesome Pro. They have the largest selection and best looking icons you can find on the internet with several variations in styles so you can find most of the icons you want for standard projects.
For the backend I was using the #GraphCool Framework. As I later found out, #GraphQL still has some way to go in order to provide the full power of a mature graph query language so later in my project I ripped out #GraphCool and replaced it with CouchDB and Pouchdb. Primarily so I could provide good offline app support. CouchDB with Pouchdb is very flexible and efficient combination and overcomes some of the restrictions I found in #GraphQL and hence #GraphCool also. The most impressive and important feature of CouchDB is its replication. You can configure it in various ways for backups, fault tolerance, caching or conditional merging of databases. CouchDB and Pouchdb even supports storing, retrieving and serving binary or image data or other mime types. This removes a level of complexity usually present in database implementations where binary or image data is usually referenced through an #HTML5 link. With CouchDB and Pouchdb apps can operate offline and sync later, very efficiently, when the network connection is good.
I use PhoneGap when testing the app. It auto-reloads your app when its code is changed and you can also install it on Android phones to preview your app instantly. iOS is a bit more tricky cause of Apple's policies so it's not available on the App Store, but you can build it and install it yourself to your device.
So that's my latest mobile stack. What tools do you use? Have you tried these ones?
At FundsCorner, when we set out to pick up the front-end tech stack (around Dec 2017), we drove our decision based on the following considerations:
(1) We were clear that we will NOT have a hybrid app. We will start with Responsive Web & once there is traction, we will rollout our Android App. However, we wanted to ensure that the users have a consistent experience on both the Web & the App. So, the front-end framework must also have a material design component library which we can choose from.
(2) Before joining FundsCorner as a CTO, I had already worked with Angular. I enjoyed working with Angular, but I felt that I must choose something that will provide us with the fastest time from Concept to Reality.
(3) I am strong proponent of segregating HTML & JavaScript. I.e. I was not for writing or generating HTML through JavaScript. Because, this will mean that the Front-end developers I have to hire will always be very strong on JavaScript alongside HTML5 & CSS. I was looking for a Framework that was on JavaScript but not HEAVY on JavaScript.
(3) The first iteration of the web app was to be done by myself. But I was clear that when someone takes up the mantle, they will be able to come up the curve fast.
In the end, Vue.js and Vuetify satisfied all the above criteria with aplomb! When I did our first POC on Vue.js I could not believe that front-end development could be this fast. The documentation was par excellence and all the required essentials that come along with the Framework (viz. Routing, Store, Validations) etc. were available from the same community! It was also a breeze to integrate with other JavaScript libraries (such as Amazon Cognito).
By picking Vuetify, we were able to provide a consistent UI experience between our Web App and Native App, besides making the UI development ultra blazing fast!
In the end, we were able to rollout our Web App in record 6 weeks (that included the end to end Loan Origination flow, Loans management system & Customer engagement module). www.jeyabalaji.com