Framework7

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 @{#CSS}|topic:null|3 which I found very frustrating after using @{#CSS}|topic:null|3 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?

I just designed, developed, and deployed my own budgeting app, dailybudget.cc, which allows me to automate my budgeting the way I have always done it, in a way that I could never fully capture with other budgeting apps, such as Mint, EveryDollar, or YNAB. I spent 4 years from the time I first had the idea to the time I actually sat down to design it and start development. During this time I evaluated many other budgeting app solutions, and had even architected a prototype that I never ended up using. But boy, have technologies come much further in 4 years.

Though my first prototype used Java and Tomcat, I completely abandoned those 4 years later in favor of Node.js technologies, which I have found are equally as stable, more flexible (for better or for worse), and capable of significantly more rapid development. Since what I have deployed now is in beta and is primarily for limited user use, I favored rapid development over slower development where I would write more automated unit tests. I chose to build the app as a HTML5 web application (rather than native iOS or Android, for now), and I used a separated API backend/Web frontend model. My target platform for use with the app is mobile handheld touch devices, though it can work on any laptop or desktop with a touchscreen. Given these design targets, many of the technologies I chose were because of familiarity with them as well as a strong online community, and some technologies I chose that I had to learn anew, because they appeared to fit my needs.

My entire app runs on a #lenovo IdeaCentre desktop on my home network, on which I have installed Ubuntu 18.04. Ubuntu is something I have switched to after a long time of use and familiarity with RedHat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, because the online support for Ubuntu is now tremendous, and there is so much documentation and examples online of how to configure and use Ubuntu; not to mention I have not been thrilled with the direction new releases of CentOS. Ubuntu is also a good environment for development - it is so easy to follow the many online examples. Lastly, I may migrate my app and configuration to Amazon AWS, which also uses Ubuntu for its EC2 Linux VMs, so having Ubuntu now is helpful for that prospect.

The API backend uses Node.js, with #HapiJS as the API server framework and MySQL as my persistence database. #HapiJS is something I have had familiarity with and is just a phenomenal framework to plug into and configure, especially if you use it for a route-based API. #Mysql has a great online community. I could've used PostgreSQL too, but I am more familiar with MySQL. Also, if I migrate to Amazon AWS, Amazon's RDS uses MySQL. I use npm as a one-stop-shop package manager and environment manager.

The Web frontend uses a combination of Framework7 and Vue.js. I cannot evangelize Framework7 enough! It is a fantasic tool by @nolimits4web (GitHub) that is really easy to use, really well thought out, and really performant. #Framework7 simulates the native iOS or Android (Google Material) experiences, all using HTML5 constructs (HTML+CSS+JS). Vue.js is another very fantastic binding and frontend framework which has a good online community and is well documented and easy to use. I had to choose between VueJS and ReactJS, and ultimately chose VueJS over ReactJS because it seemed to favor more rapid development with less ramp-up time, whereas I understood ReactJS to be more of an enterprise level framework (though still good for smaller projects like mine). When using Framework7 with VueJS, NodeJS is used along with Webpack to transpile my code into browser-friendly JavaScript, HTML, etc. Webpack was nice to use because it has a hot-deploy development mode to enable rapid development without me having stop, recompile, and start my server (this was one of several reasons against using Java with Tomcat). I had no familiarity with Framework7, VueJS, or Webpack prior to this project.

I use NGINX as my web server and have the API running behind a reverse proxy, and all of the web frontent content hosted as static content.

I use the #plaid API to sync my bank transactions to my database. This is another fantastic framework (though not free beyond development use) that it turns out is extremely easy to use for the complex job that it solves.