Alternatives to Visual Basic logo

Alternatives to Visual Basic

Python, JavaScript, MATLAB, Visual Studio, and Java are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Visual Basic.
557
501
+ 1
8

What is Visual Basic and what are its top alternatives?

Visual Basic is derived from BASIC and enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects.
Visual Basic is a tool in the Languages category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Visual Basic

  • 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. ...

  • 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. ...

  • MATLAB
    MATLAB

    Using MATLAB, you can analyze data, develop algorithms, and create models and applications. The language, tools, and built-in math functions enable you to explore multiple approaches and reach a solution faster than with spreadsheets or traditional programming languages, such as C/C++ or Java. ...

  • Visual Studio
    Visual Studio

    Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications. ...

  • Java
    Java

    Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere! ...

  • VBScript
    VBScript

    It is an Active Scripting language developed by Microsoft that is modeled on Visual Basic. It allows Microsoft Windows system administrators to generate powerful tools for managing computers with error handling, subroutines, and other advanced programming constructs. ...

  • 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. ...

  • 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. ...

Visual Basic alternatives & related posts

Python logo

Python

248.1K
193K
6.8K
A clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.
248.1K
193K
+ 1
6.8K
PROS OF PYTHON
  • 1.2K
    Great libraries
  • 957
    Readable code
  • 843
    Beautiful code
  • 783
    Rapid development
  • 687
    Large community
  • 432
    Open source
  • 389
    Elegant
  • 280
    Great community
  • 272
    Object oriented
  • 216
    Dynamic typing
  • 77
    Great standard library
  • 58
    Very fast
  • 53
    Functional programming
  • 46
    Easy to learn
  • 45
    Scientific computing
  • 35
    Great documentation
  • 28
    Matlab alternative
  • 27
    Productivity
  • 27
    Easy to read
  • 23
    Simple is better than complex
  • 20
    It's the way I think
  • 19
    Imperative
  • 18
    Free
  • 17
    Very programmer and non-programmer friendly
  • 16
    Machine learning support
  • 16
    Fast and simple
  • 16
    Powerfull language
  • 14
    Scripting
  • 12
    Explicit is better than implicit
  • 10
    Ease of development
  • 9
    Unlimited power
  • 9
    Clear and easy and powerfull
  • 8
    Import antigravity
  • 7
    It's lean and fun to code
  • 7
    Print "life is short, use python"
  • 6
    Now is better than never
  • 6
    Fast coding and good for competitions
  • 6
    There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious
  • 6
    High Documented language
  • 6
    I love snakes
  • 6
    Although practicality beats purity
  • 6
    Python has great libraries for data processing
  • 6
    Flat is better than nested
  • 6
    Great for tooling
  • 5
    Rapid Prototyping
  • 5
    Readability counts
  • 4
    Lists, tuples, dictionaries
  • 4
    Web scraping
  • 4
    CG industry needs
  • 4
    Great for analytics
  • 4
    Socially engaged community
  • 4
    Complex is better than complicated
  • 4
    Multiple Inheritence
  • 4
    Beautiful is better than ugly
  • 4
    Plotting
  • 3
    Easy to learn and use
  • 3
    Import this
  • 3
    Simple and easy to learn
  • 3
    Many types of collections
  • 3
    Easy to setup and run smooth
  • 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
    List comprehensions
  • 3
    No cruft
  • 3
    Generators
  • 2
    It is Very easy , simple and will you be love programmi
  • 2
    Batteries included
  • 2
    Because of Netflix
  • 2
    Can understand easily who are new to programming
  • 2
    Powerful language for AI
  • 2
    Should START with this but not STICK with This
  • 2
    Only one way to do it
  • 2
    A-to-Z
  • 2
    Better outcome
  • 2
    Good for hacking
  • 2
    Flexible and easy
  • 1
    Slow
  • 1
    Sexy af
  • 1
    Securit
  • 0
    Powerful
  • 0
    Ni
CONS OF PYTHON
  • 52
    Still divided between python 2 and python 3
  • 28
    Performance impact
  • 26
    Poor syntax for anonymous functions
  • 22
    GIL
  • 19
    Package management is a mess
  • 14
    Too imperative-oriented
  • 12
    Hard to understand
  • 12
    Dynamic typing
  • 12
    Very slow
  • 8
    Not everything is expression
  • 7
    Incredibly slow
  • 7
    Explicit self parameter in methods
  • 7
    Indentations matter a lot
  • 6
    Requires C functions for dynamic modules
  • 6
    No anonymous functions
  • 6
    Poor DSL capabilities
  • 5
    Fake object-oriented programming
  • 5
    Threading
  • 5
    The "lisp style" whitespaces
  • 5
    Official documentation is unclear.
  • 5
    Hard to obfuscate
  • 4
    Lack of Syntax Sugar leads to "the pyramid of doom"
  • 4
    Circular import
  • 4
    The benevolent-dictator-for-life quit
  • 4
    Not suitable for autocomplete
  • 2
    Meta classes
  • 1
    Training wheels (forced indentation)

related Python posts

Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 9.5M 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:

https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

See more
Nick Parsons
Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream · | 35 upvotes · 3.2M views

Winds 2.0 is an open source Podcast/RSS reader developed by Stream with a core goal to enable a wide range of developers to contribute.

We chose JavaScript because nearly every developer knows or can, at the very least, read JavaScript. With ES6 and Node.js v10.x.x, it’s become a very capable language. Async/Await is powerful and easy to use (Async/Await vs Promises). Babel allows us to experiment with next-generation JavaScript (features that are not in the official JavaScript spec yet). Yarn allows us to consistently install packages quickly (and is filled with tons of new tricks)

We’re using JavaScript for everything – both front and backend. Most of our team is experienced with Go and Python, so Node was not an obvious choice for this app.

Sure... there will be haters who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything remotely positive about JavaScript (there are even rants on Hacker News about Node.js); however, without writing completely in JavaScript, we would not have seen the results we did.

#FrameworksFullStack #Languages

See more
JavaScript logo

JavaScript

366.9K
263.9K
8K
Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions
366.9K
263.9K
+ 1
8K
PROS OF JAVASCRIPT
  • 1.7K
    Can be used on frontend/backend
  • 1.5K
    It's everywhere
  • 1.2K
    Lots of great frameworks
  • 896
    Fast
  • 745
    Light weight
  • 425
    Flexible
  • 392
    You can't get a device today that doesn't run js
  • 286
    Non-blocking i/o
  • 236
    Ubiquitousness
  • 191
    Expressive
  • 55
    Extended functionality to web pages
  • 49
    Relatively easy language
  • 46
    Executed on the client side
  • 30
    Relatively fast to the end user
  • 25
    Pure Javascript
  • 21
    Functional programming
  • 15
    Async
  • 13
    Full-stack
  • 12
    Its everywhere
  • 12
    Setup is easy
  • 11
    JavaScript is the New PHP
  • 11
    Because I love functions
  • 10
    Like it or not, JS is part of the web standard
  • 9
    Easy
  • 9
    Future Language of The Web
  • 9
    Can be used in backend, frontend and DB
  • 9
    Expansive community
  • 8
    Most Popular Language in the World
  • 8
    Can be used both as frontend and backend as well
  • 8
    For the good parts
  • 8
    No need to use PHP
  • 8
    Easy to hire developers
  • 8
    Everyone use it
  • 7
    Love-hate relationship
  • 7
    Popularized Class-Less Architecture & Lambdas
  • 7
    Agile, packages simple to use
  • 7
    Supports lambdas and closures
  • 7
    Powerful
  • 7
    Photoshop has 3 JS runtimes built in
  • 7
    Evolution of C
  • 6
    1.6K Can be used on frontend/backend
  • 6
    Can be used on frontend/backend/Mobile/create PRO Ui
  • 6
    Versitile
  • 6
    It let's me use Babel & Typescript
  • 6
    Easy to make something
  • 6
    Its fun and fast
  • 6
    Client side JS uses the visitors CPU to save Server Res
  • 6
    Hard not to use
  • 6
    Nice
  • 6
    It's fun
  • 5
    What to add
  • 5
    Clojurescript
  • 5
    Promise relationship
  • 5
    Stockholm Syndrome
  • 5
    Function expressions are useful for callbacks
  • 5
    Scope manipulation
  • 5
    Everywhere
  • 5
    Client processing
  • 4
    Only Programming language on browser
  • 4
    Because it is so simple and lightweight
  • 1
    Test
  • 1
    Not the best
  • 1
    Subskill #4
  • 1
    Easy to learn
  • 1
    Easy to understand
  • 1
    Hard to learn
  • 1
    Test2
  • 0
    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
  • 8
    Shows Zero output in case of ANY error
  • 7
    Thinks strange results are better than errors
  • 6
    Can be ugly
  • 3
    No GitHub
  • 2
    Slow

related JavaScript posts

Zach Holman

Oof. I have truly hated JavaScript for a long time. Like, for over twenty years now. Like, since the Clinton administration. It's always been a nightmare to deal with all of the aspects of that silly language.

But wowza, things have changed. Tooling is just way, way better. I'm primarily web-oriented, and using React and Apollo together the past few years really opened my eyes to building rich apps. And I deeply apologize for using the phrase rich apps; I don't think I've ever said such Enterprisey words before.

But yeah, things are different now. I still love Rails, and still use it for a lot of apps I build. But it's that silly rich apps phrase that's the problem. Users have way more comprehensive expectations than they did even five years ago, and the JS community does a good job at building tools and tech that tackle the problems of making heavy, complicated UI and frontend work.

Obviously there's a lot of things happening here, so just saying "JavaScript isn't terrible" might encompass a huge amount of libraries and frameworks. But if you're like me, yeah, give things another shot- I'm somehow not hating on JavaScript anymore and... gulp... I kinda love it.

See more
Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 9.5M 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:

https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

See more
MATLAB logo

MATLAB

1.1K
689
37
A high-level language and interactive environment for numerical computation, visualization, and programming
1.1K
689
+ 1
37
PROS OF MATLAB
  • 20
    Simulink
  • 5
    Model based software development
  • 5
    Functions, statements, plots, directory navigation easy
  • 3
    S-Functions
  • 2
    REPL
  • 1
    Simple variabel control
  • 1
    Solve invertible matrix
CONS OF MATLAB
  • 2
    Parameter-value pairs syntax to pass arguments clunky
  • 2
    Doesn't allow unpacking tuples/arguments lists with *
  • 2
    Does not support named function arguments

related MATLAB posts

Visual Studio logo

Visual Studio

57.4K
36.5K
1.1K
State-of-the-art tools and services that you can use to create great apps for devices, the cloud, and everything...
57.4K
36.5K
+ 1
1.1K
PROS OF VISUAL STUDIO
  • 305
    Intellisense, ui
  • 244
    Complete ide and debugger
  • 165
    Plug-ins
  • 104
    Integrated
  • 93
    Documentation
  • 37
    Fast
  • 35
    Node tools for visual studio (ntvs)
  • 33
    Free Community edition
  • 24
    Simple
  • 17
    Bug free
  • 8
    Made by Microsoft
  • 6
    Full free community version
  • 5
    JetBrains plugins (ReSharper etc.) work sufficiently OK
  • 3
    Productivity Power Tools
  • 2
    Vim mode
  • 2
    VIM integration
  • 1
    I develop UWP apps and Intellisense is super useful
  • 1
    Cross platform development
  • 1
    The Power and Easiness to Do anything in any.. language
  • 1
    Available for Mac and Windows
CONS OF VISUAL STUDIO
  • 15
    Bulky
  • 14
    Made by Microsoft
  • 5
    Sometimes you need to restart to finish an update
  • 3
    Too much size for disk
  • 3
    Only avalible on Windows

related Visual Studio posts

Maria Naggaga
Senior Program Manager - .NET Team at Microsoft · | 8 upvotes · 668.4K views

.NET Core is #free, #cross-platform, and #opensource. A developer platform for building all types of apps ( #web apps #mobile #games #machinelearning #AI and #Desktop ).

Developers have chosen .NET for:

Productive: Combined with the extensive class libraries, common APIs, multi-language support, and the powerful tooling provided by the Visual Studio family ( Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code ), .NET is the most productive platform for developers.

Any app: From mobile applications running on iOS, Android and Windows, to Enterprise server applications running on Windows Server and Linux, or high-scale microservices running in the cloud, .NET provides a solution for you.

Performance: .NET is fast. Really fast! The popular TechEmpower benchmark compares web application frameworks with tasks like JSON serialization, database access, and server side template rendering - .NET performs faster than any other popular framework.

See more
Nicholas Rogoff

Secure Membership Web API backed by SQL Server. This is the backing API to store additional profile and complex membership metadata outside of an Azure AD B2C provider. The front-end using the Azure AD B2C to allow 3rd party trusted identity providers to authenticate. This API provides a way to add and manage more complex permission structures than can easily be maintained in Azure AD.

We have .Net developers and an Azure infrastructure environment using server-less functions, logic apps and SaaS where ever possible. For this service I opted to keep it as a classic WebAPI project and deployed to AppService.

  • Trusted Authentication Provider: @AzureActiveDirectoryB2C
  • Frameworks: .NET Core
  • Language: C# , Microsoft SQL Server , JavaScript
  • IDEs: Visual Studio Code , Visual Studio
  • Libraries: jQuery @EntityFramework, @AutoMapper, @FeatureToggle , @Swashbuckle
  • Database: @SqlAzure
  • Source Control: Git
  • Build and Release Pipelines: Azure DevOps
  • Test tools: Postman , Newman
  • Test framework: @nUnit, @moq
  • Infrastructure: @AzureAppService, @AzureAPIManagement
See more
Java logo

Java

141.3K
99.1K
3.7K
A concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, language specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible
141.3K
99.1K
+ 1
3.7K
PROS OF JAVA
  • 599
    Great libraries
  • 445
    Widely used
  • 400
    Excellent tooling
  • 395
    Huge amount of documentation available
  • 334
    Large pool of developers available
  • 208
    Open source
  • 202
    Excellent performance
  • 157
    Great development
  • 150
    Used for android
  • 148
    Vast array of 3rd party libraries
  • 60
    Compiled Language
  • 52
    Used for Web
  • 46
    High Performance
  • 46
    Managed memory
  • 44
    Native threads
  • 43
    Statically typed
  • 35
    Easy to read
  • 33
    Great Community
  • 29
    Reliable platform
  • 24
    Sturdy garbage collection
  • 24
    JVM compatibility
  • 22
    Cross Platform Enterprise Integration
  • 20
    Universal platform
  • 20
    Good amount of APIs
  • 18
    Great Support
  • 14
    Great ecosystem
  • 11
    Backward compatible
  • 11
    Lots of boilerplate
  • 10
    Everywhere
  • 9
    Excellent SDK - JDK
  • 7
    It's Java
  • 7
    Cross-platform
  • 7
    Static typing
  • 6
    Mature language thus stable systems
  • 6
    Better than Ruby
  • 6
    Long term language
  • 6
    Portability
  • 5
    Clojure
  • 5
    Vast Collections Library
  • 5
    Used for Android development
  • 4
    Most developers favorite
  • 4
    Old tech
  • 3
    History
  • 3
    Great Structure
  • 3
    Stable platform, which many new languages depend on
  • 3
    Javadoc
  • 3
    Testable
  • 3
    Best martial for design
  • 2
    Type Safe
  • 2
    Faster than python
  • 0
    Job
CONS OF JAVA
  • 33
    Verbosity
  • 27
    NullpointerException
  • 17
    Nightmare to Write
  • 16
    Overcomplexity is praised in community culture
  • 12
    Boiler plate code
  • 8
    Classpath hell prior to Java 9
  • 6
    No REPL
  • 4
    No property
  • 3
    Code are too long
  • 2
    Non-intuitive generic implementation
  • 2
    There is not optional parameter
  • 2
    Floating-point errors
  • 1
    Java's too statically, stronglly, and strictly typed
  • 1
    Returning Wildcard Types
  • 1
    Terrbible compared to Python/Batch Perormence

related Java posts

Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 9.5M 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:

https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

See more
Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 28 upvotes · 3.8M views

When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.

See more
VBScript logo

VBScript

51
53
0
An Active Scripting language that is modeled on Visual Basic
51
53
+ 1
0
PROS OF VBSCRIPT
    Be the first to leave a pro
    CONS OF VBSCRIPT
      Be the first to leave a con

      related VBScript posts

      PowerShell logo

      PowerShell

      7.8K
      1K
      0
      A task automation and configuration management framework
      7.8K
      1K
      + 1
      0
      PROS OF POWERSHELL
        Be the first to leave a pro
        CONS OF POWERSHELL
          Be the first to leave a con

          related PowerShell posts

          Shared insights
          on
          PowerShellPowerShellPythonPython

          I currently work helpdesk and have been for about 6 years. I am looking to become more valuable, and I can't decide what route to take? Python is of interest, and so is PowerShell. What are some recommendations? Maybe something that would benefit a helpdesk position or even get into a network administrator.

          See more

          Objective: I am trying to build a custom service that will create VMs in Azure, based on inputs taken from a web interface. I want the backend code that interacts with Azure to be PowerShell.

          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.

          Is there a better way? I just need help getting the right directions; I will walk the way.

          See more
          HTML5 logo

          HTML5

          143.6K
          122K
          2.2K
          5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web
          143.6K
          122K
          + 1
          2.2K
          PROS OF HTML5
          • 447
            New doctype
          • 389
            Local storage
          • 334
            Canvas
          • 285
            Semantic header and footer
          • 240
            Video element
          • 121
            Geolocation
          • 105
            Form autofocus
          • 100
            Email inputs
          • 85
            Editable content
          • 79
            Application caches
          • 10
            Easy to use
          • 9
            Cleaner Code
          • 4
            Easy
          • 4
            Semantical
          • 3
            Better
          • 3
            Audio element
          • 3
            Modern
          • 3
            Websockets
          • 2
            Semantic Header and Footer, Geolocation, New Doctype
          • 2
            Content focused
          • 2
            Compatible
          • 2
            Portability
          • 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

          related HTML5 posts

          Jan Vlnas
          Developer Advocate at Superface · | 26 upvotes · 328.1K views
          Shared insights
          on
          HTML5HTML5JavaScriptJavaScriptNext.jsNext.js

          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.

          See more
          Jonathan Pugh
          Software Engineer / Project Manager / Technical Architect · | 25 upvotes · 2.9M 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?

          See more