TypeScript

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?

Earlier this year, we started developing a new app to help our runners deliver groceries to our customers. We chose React Native over a native app or a PWA and are really happy with it. So far, we really like what we are seeing. Development speed is fast and the tooling is awesome. The “learn once, write anywhere”-promise is really fulfilled and when we ran our project for the first time on iOS after a few weeks of development, we were excited to see how well it worked and what it looked like.

Read our blog post to learn more about how we use React Native, TypeScript, Redux.js, RxJS, CodePush, styled-components, React Storybook, Jest, and Prettier to develop this app, as well as our thought of what else we will do with it at Picnic.

Onedot is building an automated data preparation service using probabilistic and statistical methods including artificial intelligence (AI). From the beginning, having a stable foundation while at the same time being able to iterate quickly was very important to us. Due to the nature of compute workloads we face, the decision for a functional programming paradigm and a scalable cluster model was a no-brainer. We started playing with Apache Spark very early on, when the platform was still in its infancy. As a storage backend, we first used Cassandra, but found out that it was not the optimal choice for our workloads (lots of rather smallish datasets, data pipelines with considerable complexity, etc.). In the end, we migrated dataset storage to Amazon S3 which proved to be much more adequate to our case. In the frontend, we bet on more traditional frameworks like React/Redux.js, Blueprint and a number of common npm packages of our universe. Because of the very positive experience with Scala (in particular the ability to write things very expressively, use immutability across the board, etc.) we settled with TypeScript in the frontend. In our opinion, a very good decision. Nowadays, transpiling is a common thing, so we thought why not introduce the same type-safety and mathematical rigour to the user interface?

ReactQL is a React + GraphQL front-end starter kit. #JSX is a natural way to think about building UI, and it renders to pure #HTML in the browser and on the server, making it trivial to build server-rendered Single Page Apps. GraphQL via Apollo was chosen for the data layer; #GraphQL makes it simple to request just the data your app needs, and #Apollo takes care of communicating with your API (written in any language; doesn't have to be JavaScript!), caching, and rendering to #React.

ReactQL is written in TypeScript to provide full types/Intellisense, and pick up hard-to-diagnose goofs that might later show up at runtime. React makes heavy use of Webpack 4 to handle transforming your code to an optimised client-side bundle, and in throws back just enough code needed for the initial render, while seamlessly handling import statements asynchronously as needed, making the payload your user downloads ultimately much smaller than trying to do it by hand.

React Helmet was chosen to handle <head> content, because it works universally, making it easy to throw back the correct <title> and other tags on the initial render, as well as inject new tags for subsequent client-side views.

styled-components, Sass, Less and PostCSS were added to give developers a choice of whether to build styles purely in React / JavaScript, or whether to defer to a #css #preprocessor. This is especially useful for interop with UI frameworks like Bootstrap, Semantic UI, Foundation, etc - ReactQL lets you mix and match #css and renders to both a static .css file during bundling as well as generates per-page <style> tags when using #StyledComponents.

React Router handles routing, because it works both on the server and in the client. ReactQL customises it further by capturing non-200 responses on the server, redirecting or throwing back custom 404 pages as needed.

Koa is the web server that handles all incoming HTTP requests, because it's fast (TTFB < 5ms, even after fully rendering React), and its natively #async, making it easy to async/await inside routes and middleware.

We chose TypeScript at Codecov when undergoing a recent rewrite of a legacy front end. Our previous front end was a mishmash of vanilla JavaScript and CoffeeScript , and was expanded upon haphazardly as the need arose. Without a unifying set of paradigms and patterns, the CoffeeScript and JavaScript setup was proving hard to maintain and expand upon by an engineering team. During a move to Vue.js , we decided to also make the move to TypeScript. Integrating TypeScript and Vue.js is fairly well understood at this point, so the setup wasn't all that difficult, and we felt that the benefits of incorporating TypeScript would outweigh the required time to set it up and get our engineering team up to speed.

Choosing to add TypeScript has given us one more layer to rely on to help enforce code quality, good standards, and best practices within our engineering organization. One of the biggest benefits for us as an engineering team has been how well our IDEs and editors (e.g., Visual Studio Code ) integrate with and understand TypeScript . This allows developers to catch many more errors at development time instead of relying on run time. The end result is safer (from a type perspective) code and a more efficient coding experience that helps to catch and remove errors with less developer effort.

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...

TypeScript has been a win because, in general, it makes codebase maintenance less brittle. It's significantly easier to refactor in TS than JS, which encourages incremental improvements, file re-organizing, etc. Our developers are happier with the overall development experience.

The downside is that TS sometimes exacerbates problems caused by Node's fragmented ecosystem. Sometimes @types/ don't work, other times types are outdated. This can lead to problems with newly-installed libraries.

If your project is big enough, I'd say TS is nearly always worth it, but it can make selecting libraries annoying.

#typescript #NewCraft

The front end for Heap begun to grow unwieldy. The original jQuery pieces became difficult to maintain and scale, and a decision was made to introduce Backbone.js, Marionette, and TypeScript. Ultimately this ended up being a “detour” in the search for a scalable and maintainable front-end solution. The system did allow for developers to reuse components efficiently, but adding features was a difficult process, and it eventually became a bottleneck in advancing the product.

Today, the Heap product consists primarily of a customer-facing dashboard powered by React, MobX, and TypeScript on the front end. We wrote our migration to React and MobX in detail last year here.

#JavascriptUiLibraries #Libraries #JavascriptMvcFrameworks #TemplatingLanguagesExtensions

The client-side stack of Shopify Admin has been a long journey. It started with HTML templates, jQuery and Prototype. We moved to Batman.js, our in-house Single-Page-Application framework (SPA), in 2013. Then, we re-evaluated our approach and moved back to statically rendered HTML and vanilla JavaScript. As the front-end ecosystem matured, we felt that it was time to rethink our approach again. Last year, we started working on moving Shopify Admin to React and TypeScript.

Many things have changed since the days of jQuery and Batman. JavaScript execution is much faster. We can easily render our apps on the server to do less work on the client, and the resources and tooling for developers are substantially better with React than we ever had with Batman.

#FrameworksFullStack #Languages