Alternatives to Cygwin logo

Alternatives to Cygwin

Putty, PowerShell, Ubuntu, JavaScript, and Python are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Cygwin.
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What is Cygwin and what are its top alternatives?

Cygwin is a popular tool that allows users to run a Unix-like environment on Windows operating systems. It provides users with a collection of tools and libraries that emulate a Linux-like environment, allowing them to run Unix software and commands on Windows machines. While Cygwin is convenient for developers who need to work in a Unix-like environment on Windows, it can sometimes be slow and resource-intensive.

  1. MSYS2: MSYS2 is a software distribution and building platform for Windows. It provides a Unix-like environment with a package manager that allows you to easily install and manage software packages.

  2. Git Bash: Git Bash is a Unix-like environment for Windows users that comes bundled with Git for Windows. It provides a command-line interface with Unix tools and utilities.

  3. Babun: Babun is a Windows shell that brings the power of the Linux command line to Windows. It is based on Cygwin and provides a package manager for easy installation of Unix utilities.

  4. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL): WSL allows you to run a Linux distribution natively on Windows, without the need for a virtual machine. It provides seamless integration between Windows and Linux.

  5. MinGW: MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows) is a collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows-specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any third-party C runtime DLLs.

  6. Cygwin Ports: Cygwin Ports is a port of many popular software packages to Cygwin. It provides a repository of pre-compiled packages that can be easily installed on Cygwin.

  7. GNUWin: GNUWin provides ports of many GNU Unix utilities to Windows. It allows you to run Unix commands and tools on Windows without the need for Cygwin.

  8. Windows Terminal: Windows Terminal is a modern terminal emulator for Windows that supports multiple tabs, panes, and customization options. It allows you to run command-line tools and shells, including PowerShell, Command Prompt, and WSL.

  9. Cmder: Cmder is a console emulator for Windows that provides a Unix-like command-line experience. It comes with features like multiple tabs, panes, and themes.

  10. Pengwin: Pengwin is a Linux distribution optimized for WSL. It provides a Linux environment with access to the Windows file system and integrates seamlessly with Windows tools and applications.

Top Alternatives to Cygwin

  • Putty
    Putty

    It is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. It is open source software that is available with source code and is developed and supported by a group of volunteers. ...

  • PowerShell
    PowerShell

    A command-line shell and scripting language built on .NET. Helps system administrators and power-users rapidly automate tasks that manage operating systems (Linux, macOS, and Windows) and processes. ...

  • Ubuntu
    Ubuntu

    Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers. ...

  • JavaScript
    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. ...

  • Python
    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. ...

  • Node.js
    Node.js

    Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. ...

  • HTML5
    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. ...

  • PHP
    PHP

    Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world. ...

Cygwin alternatives & related posts

Putty logo

Putty

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        Ask: Hoping to find help with deciding the simplest architecture of tools to achieve this.

        What I have so far with my Limited Knowledge: I am new to Azure and Jenkins. I arrived at Jenkins coz it can run PowerShell and has API that can be called to trigger a job. Although integrating with it over the web seems problematic since its on-prem network. I hear it is possible using the VPN. For the Web, I hope to use Azure Web App with Python/Node.js that I can manage to make API calls to Jenkins.

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        Ubuntu logo

        Ubuntu

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        Google Analytics Analytics of course for a tailored analytics, Bulma as an innovative CSS framework, coupled with our Sass (Scss) pre-processor.

        As of more basic stuff, we use HTML5, JavaScript (but with Vue.js too) and Webpack to handle the generation of all this.

        To deploy, we set up Buddy to easily send the updates on our nginx / Ubuntu server, where it will connect to our GitHub Git private repository, pull and do all the operations needed with Deployer .

        CloudFlare ensure the rapidity of distribution of our content, and Let's Encrypt the https certificate that is more than necessary when we'll want to sell some products with our Stripe api calls.

        Asana is here to let us list all the functionalities, possibilities and ideas we want to implement.

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        JavaScript

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          It's everywhere
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          Lots of great frameworks
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          Fast
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          Light weight
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          Flexible
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          You can't get a device today that doesn't run js
        • 286
          Non-blocking i/o
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          Ubiquitousness
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          Expressive
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          Relatively easy language
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          Executed on the client side
        • 30
          Relatively fast to the end user
        • 25
          Pure Javascript
        • 21
          Functional programming
        • 15
          Async
        • 13
          Full-stack
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          Future Language of The Web
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          Setup is easy
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          Its everywhere
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          Because I love functions
        • 11
          JavaScript is the New PHP
        • 10
          Like it or not, JS is part of the web standard
        • 9
          Easy
        • 9
          Can be used in backend, frontend and DB
        • 9
          Expansive community
        • 9
          Everyone use it
        • 8
          Easy to hire developers
        • 8
          Most Popular Language in the World
        • 8
          For the good parts
        • 8
          Can be used both as frontend and backend as well
        • 8
          No need to use PHP
        • 8
          Powerful
        • 7
          Evolution of C
        • 7
          Its fun and fast
        • 7
          It's fun
        • 7
          Nice
        • 7
          Versitile
        • 7
          Hard not to use
        • 7
          Popularized Class-Less Architecture & Lambdas
        • 7
          Agile, packages simple to use
        • 7
          Supports lambdas and closures
        • 7
          Love-hate relationship
        • 7
          Photoshop has 3 JS runtimes built in
        • 6
          1.6K Can be used on frontend/backend
        • 6
          Client side JS uses the visitors CPU to save Server Res
        • 6
          It let's me use Babel & Typescript
        • 6
          Easy to make something
        • 6
          Can be used on frontend/backend/Mobile/create PRO Ui
        • 5
          Client processing
        • 5
          What to add
        • 5
          Everywhere
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          Scope manipulation
        • 5
          Function expressions are useful for callbacks
        • 5
          Stockholm Syndrome
        • 5
          Promise relationship
        • 5
          Clojurescript
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          Only Programming language on browser
        • 4
          Because it is so simple and lightweight
        • 1
          Easy to learn and test
        • 1
          Easy to understand
        • 1
          Not the best
        • 1
          Subskill #4
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          Hard to learn
        • 1
          Test2
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          Test
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          Easy to learn
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          Hard 彤
        CONS OF JAVASCRIPT
        • 22
          A constant moving target, too much churn
        • 20
          Horribly inconsistent
        • 15
          Javascript is the New PHP
        • 9
          No ability to monitor memory utilitization
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          Shows Zero output in case of ANY error
        • 7
          Thinks strange results are better than errors
        • 6
          Can be ugly
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          Slow
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        Conor Myhrvold
        Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 12.7M views

        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:

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        Python logo

        Python

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          Great libraries
        • 963
          Readable code
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          Beautiful code
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          Rapid development
        • 691
          Large community
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          Great community
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          Object oriented
        • 221
          Dynamic typing
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          Great standard library
        • 60
          Very fast
        • 55
          Functional programming
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          Easy to learn
        • 46
          Scientific computing
        • 35
          Great documentation
        • 29
          Productivity
        • 28
          Matlab alternative
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          Easy to read
        • 24
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        • 20
          It's the way I think
        • 19
          Imperative
        • 18
          Very programmer and non-programmer friendly
        • 18
          Free
        • 17
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        • 17
          Powerfull language
        • 16
          Fast and simple
        • 14
          Scripting
        • 12
          Explicit is better than implicit
        • 11
          Ease of development
        • 10
          Clear and easy and powerfull
        • 9
          Unlimited power
        • 8
          Import antigravity
        • 8
          It's lean and fun to code
        • 7
          Print "life is short, use python"
        • 7
          Python has great libraries for data processing
        • 6
          High Documented language
        • 6
          I love snakes
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          Readability counts
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          Rapid Prototyping
        • 6
          Now is better than never
        • 6
          Although practicality beats purity
        • 6
          Flat is better than nested
        • 6
          Great for tooling
        • 6
          There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious
        • 6
          Fast coding and good for competitions
        • 5
          Web scraping
        • 5
          Lists, tuples, dictionaries
        • 5
          Great for analytics
        • 4
          Beautiful is better than ugly
        • 4
          Easy to learn and use
        • 4
          Easy to setup and run smooth
        • 4
          Multiple Inheritence
        • 4
          CG industry needs
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          Socially engaged community
        • 4
          Complex is better than complicated
        • 4
          Plotting
        • 4
          Simple and easy to learn
        • 3
          List comprehensions
        • 3
          Powerful language for AI
        • 3
          Flexible and easy
        • 3
          It is Very easy , simple and will you be love programmi
        • 3
          Many types of collections
        • 3
          If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a g
        • 3
          If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad id
        • 3
          Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules
        • 3
          Pip install everything
        • 3
          No cruft
        • 3
          Generators
        • 3
          Import this
        • 2
          Batteries included
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          Can understand easily who are new to programming
        • 2
          Should START with this but not STICK with This
        • 2
          A-to-Z
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          Because of Netflix
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          Only one way to do it
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          Better outcome
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          Good for hacking
        • 1
          Best friend for NLP
        • 1
          Sexy af
        • 1
          Procedural programming
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          Automation friendly
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        • 0
          Powerful
        • 0
          Ni
        CONS OF PYTHON
        • 53
          Still divided between python 2 and python 3
        • 28
          Performance impact
        • 26
          Poor syntax for anonymous functions
        • 22
          GIL
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          Package management is a mess
        • 14
          Too imperative-oriented
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          Hard to understand
        • 12
          Dynamic typing
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          Very slow
        • 8
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          Not everything is expression
        • 7
          Incredibly slow
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          Explicit self parameter in methods
        • 6
          Requires C functions for dynamic modules
        • 6
          Poor DSL capabilities
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          No anonymous functions
        • 5
          Fake object-oriented programming
        • 5
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          The "lisp style" whitespaces
        • 5
          Official documentation is unclear.
        • 5
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        • 4
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        Node.js logo

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        • 477
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          Great community
        • 390
          Great for realtime apps
        • 296
          Great for command line utilities
        • 85
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        • 83
          Node Modules
        • 69
          Uber Simple
        • 59
          Great modularity
        • 58
          Allows us to reuse code in the frontend
        • 42
          Easy to start
        • 35
          Great for Data Streaming
        • 32
          Realtime
        • 28
          Awesome
        • 25
          Non blocking IO
        • 18
          Can be used as a proxy
        • 17
          High performance, open source, scalable
        • 16
          Non-blocking and modular
        • 15
          Easy and Fun
        • 14
          Easy and powerful
        • 13
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        • 13
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        • 12
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        • 11
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        • 10
          Scalability
        • 10
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        • 9
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        • 7
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        • 6
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        • 6
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          Control everything
        • 5
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        • 5
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          Scalable
        • 5
          Great speed
        • 5
          Fast development
        • 4
          It's fast
        • 4
          Easy to use
        • 4
          Isomorphic coolness
        • 3
          Great community
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        • 3
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        • 3
          Easy to learn
        • 3
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        • 3
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        • 3
          Less boilerplate code
        • 2
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        • 2
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        • 2
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        • 1
          Creat for apis
        • 0
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        CONS OF NODE.JS
        • 46
          Bound to a single CPU
        • 45
          New framework every day
        • 40
          Lots of terrible examples on the internet
        • 33
          Asynchronous programming is the worst
        • 24
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        • 19
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        • 11
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        • 11
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        • 10
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        • 7
          Very very Slow
        • 7
          Can block whole server easily
        • 7
          Callback functions may not fire on expected sequence
        • 4
          Breaking updates
        • 4
          Unstable
        • 3
          Unneeded over complication
        • 3
          No standard approach
        • 1
          Bad transitive dependency management
        • 1
          Can't read server session

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        Shared insights
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        I just finished the very first version of my new hobby project: #MovieGeeks. It is a minimalist online movie catalog for you to save the movies you want to see and for rating the movies you already saw. This is just the beginning as I am planning to add more features on the lines of sharing and discovery

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        I'm currently looking for a code coverage tool that can accurately measure the code coverage of my backend code when triggered by the API testing framework. I've tried using Istanbul and NYC with instrumented code, but the results are not as expected.

        Could you please recommend a reliable code coverage tool or suggest an approach to effectively measure the code coverage of my Node.js/Express.js backend code in this setup?

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        HTML5 logo

        HTML5

        148.8K
        2.2K
        5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web
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        2.2K
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        • 447
          New doctype
        • 389
          Local storage
        • 334
          Canvas
        • 285
          Semantic header and footer
        • 240
          Video element
        • 121
          Geolocation
        • 106
          Form autofocus
        • 100
          Email inputs
        • 85
          Editable content
        • 79
          Application caches
        • 10
          Easy to use
        • 9
          Cleaner Code
        • 5
          Easy
        • 4
          Websockets
        • 4
          Semantical
        • 3
          Better
        • 3
          Audio element
        • 3
          Modern
        • 2
          Portability
        • 2
          Semantic Header and Footer, Geolocation, New Doctype
        • 2
          Content focused
        • 2
          Compatible
        • 1
          Very easy to learning to HTML
        CONS OF HTML5
        • 1
          Easy to forget the tags when you're a begginner
        • 1
          Long and winding code

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        Senior Software Engineer at Mews · | 26 upvotes · 400.5K views
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        Few years ago we were building a Next.js site with a few simple forms. This required handling forms validation and submission, but instead of picking some forms library, we went with plain JavaScript and constraint validation API in HTML5. This shaved off a few KBs of dependencies and gave us full control over the validation behavior and look. I describe this approach, with its pros and cons, in a blog post.

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        Jonathan Pugh
        Software Engineer / Project Manager / Technical Architect · | 25 upvotes · 3M views

        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?

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        PHP

        144.4K
        4.6K
        A popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development
        144.4K
        4.6K
        PROS OF PHP
        • 953
          Large community
        • 819
          Open source
        • 767
          Easy deployment
        • 487
          Great frameworks
        • 387
          The best glue on the web
        • 235
          Continual improvements
        • 185
          Good old web
        • 145
          Web foundation
        • 135
          Community packages
        • 125
          Tool support
        • 35
          Used by wordpress
        • 34
          Excellent documentation
        • 29
          Used by Facebook
        • 23
          Because of Symfony
        • 21
          Dynamic Language
        • 17
          Easy to learn
        • 17
          Cheap hosting
        • 15
          Very powerful web language
        • 14
          Awesome Language and easy to implement
        • 14
          Fast development
        • 14
          Because of Laravel
        • 13
          Composer
        • 12
          Flexibility, syntax, extensibility
        • 9
          Easiest deployment
        • 8
          Readable Code
        • 8
          Fast
        • 7
          Short development lead times
        • 7
          Most of the web uses it
        • 7
          Worst popularity quality ratio
        • 7
          Fastestest Time to Version 1.0 Deployments
        • 6
          Simple, flexible yet Scalable
        • 6
          Faster then ever
        • 5
          Open source and large community
        • 4
          Cheap to own
        • 4
          Has the best ecommerce(Magento,Prestashop,Opencart,etc)
        • 4
          Is like one zip of air
        • 4
          Open source and great framework
        • 4
          Large community, easy setup, easy deployment, framework
        • 4
          Easy to use and learn
        • 4
          Easy to learn, a big community, lot of frameworks
        • 4
          Great developer experience
        • 4
          I have no choice :(
        • 2
          Hard not to use
        • 2
          Walk away
        • 2
          Interpreted at the run time
        • 2
          FFI
        • 2
          Safe the planet
        • 2
          Used by STOMT
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          Fault tolerance
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          Great flexibility. From fast prototyping to large apps
        • 1
          Simplesaml
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          Bando
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          Secure
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          It can get you a lamborghini
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          Secure
        CONS OF PHP
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          So easy to learn, good practices are hard to find
        • 16
          Inconsistent API
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          Fragmented community
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          Not secure
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          No routing system
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          Hard to debug
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