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Apache Cordova

706
893
+ 1
218
ES6

71.4K
60K
+ 1
165
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Apache Cordova vs ES6: What are the differences?

Apache Cordova: Platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Apache Cordova is a set of device APIs that allow a mobile app developer to access native device function such as the camera or accelerometer from JavaScript. Combined with a UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch, this allows a smartphone app to be developed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; ES6: The next version of JavaScript. Goals for ECMAScript 2015 include providing better support for large applications, library creation, and for use of ECMAScript as a compilation target for other languages. Some of its major enhancements include modules, class declarations, lexical block scoping, iterators and generators, promises for asynchronous programming, destructuring patterns, and proper tail calls.

Apache Cordova and ES6 are primarily classified as "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" and "Languages" tools respectively.

"Lots of plugins" is the top reason why over 31 developers like Apache Cordova, while over 98 developers mention "ES6 code is shorter than traditional JS" as the leading cause for choosing ES6.

Apache Cordova is an open source tool with 766 GitHub stars and 327 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Apache Cordova's open source repository on GitHub.

Slack, StackShare, and ebay are some of the popular companies that use ES6, whereas Apache Cordova is used by Teleport, Hybrid Heroes, and JustWatch. ES6 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1461 company stacks & 1725 developers stacks; compared to Apache Cordova, which is listed in 96 company stacks and 45 developer stacks.

Decisions about Apache Cordova and ES6
Amir Mousavi

This post is a bit of an obvious one, as we have a web application, we obviously need to have HTML and CSS in our stack. Though specifically though, we can talk a bit about backward compatibility and the specific approaches we want to enforce in our codebase.

HTML : Not much explanation here, you have to interact with HTML for a web app. We will stick to the latest standard: HTML 5.

CSS: Again if we want to style any of our components within he web, we have to use to style it. Though we will be taking advantage of JSS in our code base and try to minimize the # of CSS stylesheets and include all our styling within the components themselves. This leaves the codebase much cleaner and makes it easier to find styles!

Babel: We understand that not every browser is able to support the cool new features of the latest node/JS features (such as redue, filter, etc) seen in ES6. We will make sure to have the correct Babel configuration o make our application backward compatible.

Material UI (MUI): We need to make our user interface as intuitive and pretty as possible within his MVP, and the UI framework used by Google will provide us with exactly that. MUI provides pretty much all the UI components you would need and allows heavy customization as well. Its vast # of demos will allow us to add components quickly and not get too hung up on making UI components.

We will be using the latest version of create-react-app which bundles most of the above along many necessary frameworks (e.g. Jest for testing) to get started quickly.

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For our front-end, React is chosen because it is easy to develop with due to its reusable components and state functions, in addition to a lot of community support. Because React is popular, it would be easy to hire for it here at our company MusiCore. Our team also has experience with React already. React can be written with ES6 and ES6 has a lot of popularity and versatility when it comes to creating classes and efficient functions. Node.js will be used as a runtime environment to compile the code. Node.js also has many different types of open-source packages that can help automate some of the tasks we want to do for the application. CSS 3 will be used to style components and is the standard for that.

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Aleksandr Filatov
Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft · | 3 upvotes · 213.8K views
How to make your JS code faster just adding some parenthesis?

Optimize-js I will not describe this tool a lot here, because it's already good done by author on github

I just want to mention that this tool wrap up all immediately-invoked functions or likely-to-be-invoked functions in parentheses what is do a great optimization a JavaScript file for faster initial execution and parsing (based on my experience).

The performance of application where I've introduced optimize-js improved on 20% in a common (tested in Chrome and IE11).

Why it happens?

Is it maintaining now? - Unfortunately, no (but feel free to send PR)

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Aleksandr Filatov
Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft · | 2 upvotes · 413.4K views

I've done some Hybrid Mobile apps with both technologies Apache Cordova and React Native and described my experience in my blog.

In a few words, I would suggest to use each technology in accordance what what is your current code base and what do you want to achieve.

React Native is a great option if you need that extra edge in performance with multi-threading and native UI rendering. Or you already have a web app based on React which you want to port to mobile.

On the other hand, if you have an existing web application code and you want to reuse some or all, including the ability to use web third-party libraries, then Cordova is the best option.

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Aleksandr Filatov
Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft · | 2 upvotes · 113.6K views
What is Proguard?

ProGuard is the most popular optimizer for Java bytecode. It makes your Java and Android applications up to 90% smaller and up to 20% faster. ProGuard also provides minimal protection against reverse engineering by obfuscating the names of classes, fields and methods.

How to use it in Cordova app?

I didn't find any plugins for it. So I've implemented it by myself and shared it on GitHub.

Feel free to use!

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Pros of Apache Cordova
Pros of ES6
  • 48
    Lots of plugins
  • 35
    JavaScript
  • 26
    Great community
  • 25
    Easy Development
  • 18
    Easy to learn
  • 15
    Cross platform
  • 7
    Open Source
  • 6
    Easy, fast, not buggy in my experience with my code
  • 6
    Lots of descendants; PhoneGap, Ionic, Intel XDA etc
  • 4
    Can use CSS3
  • 4
    Rich HTML 5
  • 4
    Easy debugging
  • 3
    HTML, CSS and JS
  • 3
    Fast and hot reload
  • 3
    Rich css ui
  • 3
    Use what you code in your browser
  • 2
    Need a light system
  • 2
    Native Web Technologies
  • 2
    Without extra tooling needed
  • 2
    One code base everywhere
  • 109
    ES6 code is shorter than traditional JS
  • 52
    Module System Standardized
  • 2
    Extremly compact
  • 2
    Destructuring Assignment

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Cons of Apache Cordova
Cons of ES6
  • 2
    No native performance
  • 1
    Hard to install
  • 0
    Hard to install
  • 1
    Create Node.js
  • 1
    Suffers from baggage

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- No public GitHub repository available -

What is Apache Cordova?

Apache Cordova is a set of device APIs that allow a mobile app developer to access native device function such as the camera or accelerometer from JavaScript. Combined with a UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch, this allows a smartphone app to be developed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

What is ES6?

Goals for ECMAScript 2015 include providing better support for large applications, library creation, and for use of ECMAScript as a compilation target for other languages. Some of its major enhancements include modules, class declarations, lexical block scoping, iterators and generators, promises for asynchronous programming, destructuring patterns, and proper tail calls.

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What companies use Apache Cordova?
What companies use ES6?
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What tools integrate with Apache Cordova?
What tools integrate with ES6?

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What are some alternatives to Apache Cordova and ES6?
Xamarin
Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
PhoneGap
PhoneGap is a web platform that exposes native mobile device apis and data to JavaScript. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platforms' native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's sensors, data, and network status.
React Native
React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.
Electron
With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.
Ionic
Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.
See all alternatives