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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Mobile Development
  5. Onsen UI vs RIBs

Onsen UI vs RIBs

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Onsen UI
Onsen UI
Stacks40
Followers136
Votes11
GitHub Stars8.9K
Forks1.0K
RIBs
RIBs
Stacks37
Followers78
Votes0
GitHub Stars7.9K
Forks912

Onsen UI vs RIBs: What are the differences?

  1. Architecture: Onsen UI follows a hybrid architecture, combining both native and web technologies, allowing developers to create cross-platform applications using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. On the other hand, RIBs uses a modular architecture that breaks down the application into small, reusable components called RIBs, providing more flexibility in managing complex UI flows.

  2. Component Library: Onsen UI offers a rich set of UI components that are designed to mimic native look and feel across various platforms, making it easier for developers to create visually appealing and user-friendly apps. In contrast, RIBs focuses more on app architecture and workflow, providing tools and patterns to organize and scale UI components effectively while maintaining a clear separation of concerns.

  3. Data Binding: Onsen UI has built-in support for two-way data binding, allowing developers to establish a connection between the UI elements and the data model, ensuring that changes in one are reflected in the other automatically. RIBs, on the other hand, emphasizes unidirectional data flow, where data changes flow down the hierarchy of components, making it easier to track the state of the application and prevent unexpected side effects.

  4. Navigation: Onsen UI offers a powerful navigation system that supports various navigation patterns, such as stack navigation, tab navigation, and side menu navigation, making it easy to create complex navigation structures in mobile applications. RIBs, however, provides a more structured approach to navigation, using a tree-like hierarchy of components to define the flow of the application and manage the navigation state more efficiently.

  5. Testing: Onsen UI comes with built-in tools and utilities for testing mobile applications, including support for automated testing frameworks like Appium and Selenium, making it easier for developers to write and execute tests to ensure the quality and reliability of their apps. RIBs, on the other hand, focuses on testing at the component level, providing tools and strategies to isolate and test individual components in isolation, allowing for more thorough and targeted testing of the application.

  6. Community Support: Onsen UI has a large and active community of developers and contributors, providing extensive documentation, tutorials, and support forums to help developers get started and troubleshoot any issues they encounter while building their apps. In comparison, RIBs is relatively newer and has a smaller community but is backed by a dedicated team and offers comprehensive documentation and resources to support developers in adopting and implementing the RIBs architecture effectively.

In Summary, Onsen UI and RIBs differ in architecture, component library, data binding, navigation, testing, and community support, offering developers distinct approaches to building cross-platform mobile applications.

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Detailed Comparison

Onsen UI
Onsen UI
RIBs
RIBs

Onsen UI helps you develop both hybrid and web apps. If developing hybrid apps, you can use it with the Cordova / PhoneGap command line, or with Monaca tools (CLI, Monaca IDE - cloud-based IDE for Cordova, Localkit - desktop GUI).

RIBs is the cross-platform architecture framework behind many mobile apps at Uber. The name RIBs is short for Router, Interactor and Builder, which are core components of this architecture. This framework is designed for mobile apps with a large number of engineers and nested states.

Open source HTML5 hybrid app framework for PhoneGap & Cordova; JavaScript framework agnostic; Mobile-optimized HTML5, CSS and JavaScript with Web components; UI framework; Responsive layout; Material and Flat design; Comprehensive toolset (CLI, IDE, debugger, remote build etc.) provided as Monaca
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
8.9K
GitHub Stars
7.9K
GitHub Forks
1.0K
GitHub Forks
912
Stacks
40
Stacks
37
Followers
136
Followers
78
Votes
11
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 3
    Works with any JavaScript framework
  • 3
    Allows for rapid prototyping
  • 3
    Hybrid mobile
  • 2
    Free
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
Android Studio
Android Studio
Android SDK
Android SDK
Cocoa Touch (iOS)
Cocoa Touch (iOS)
Xcode
Xcode
IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ IDEA

What are some alternatives to Onsen UI, RIBs?

Ionic

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.

Flutter

Flutter

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

React Native

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.

Xamarin

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.

NativeScript

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

Apache Cordova

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.

Framework7

Framework7

It is a free and open source mobile HTML framework to develop hybrid mobile apps or web apps with iOS native look and feel. All you need to make it work is a simple HTML layout and attached framework's CSS and JS files.

Qt

Qt

Qt, a leading cross-platform application and UI framework. With Qt, you can develop applications once and deploy to leading desktop, embedded & mobile targets.

PhoneGap

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.

Expo

Expo

It is a framework and a platform for universal React applications. It is a set of tools and services built around React Native and native platforms that help you develop, build, deploy, and quickly iterate on iOS, Android, and web apps.

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