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by nicoburns 1753 days ago
IME for a lot of apps, most of the development is the UI. Lot's of apps have most of their business logic on a server these days anyway. The problem is not typically how to share business logic, it's how to avoid writing 5 different UI's that do the same thing.
1 comments
pjmlp 1752 days ago
Have the UI defined in JSON or whatever rocks your boat, even HTML, but then map those concepts to native widgets.

Some native apps on Android/iOS do exactly this, with UI coming from Web API calls.

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nicoburns 1752 days ago
Isn't this exactly what a system like react-native provides? Just off the shelf for commom patterns, and backed by a turing complete language. If you have yo build out the UI toolkit yourself yhen you haven't really saved much.
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pjmlp 1752 days ago
Not at all because it isn't native to the platform.

These solutions use the native SDKs of the platform directly.

So you are e.g. using Java/Kotlin on Android and Swift/Objective-C on iOS.

React native brings JavaScript and VM for the ride.

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nicoburns 1752 days ago
Is a JavaScript VM really that different to intepreted JSON files? With react-native, the UI controls are using the platform native toolkits, there's just an abstraction layer on top.

Checkout https://github.com/gorhom/react-native-bottom-sheet for example.

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pjmlp 1752 days ago
Definitely, because first JSON was just a possible format, secondly, whatever format is used, it is serialisation format for a native language, using the native APIs of the platform.

There is no interpretation going on.

The abstraction layer for react native has JavaScript engine in the middle, plus a marshaling layer to go through OS APIs, and on Android is double slow, because NDK only has game related APIs, anything else requires a second marshaling call to go through JNI.

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