Ask HN: Recommended tools for creating apps that render to both native and web? | HN Mirror

Y	Hacker News new \| ask \| show \| jobs

Ask HN: Recommended tools for creating apps that render to both native and web?

7 points by wakaflockafliz 4012 days ago

Are any of you familiar with any nice tools which enable creating apps that render to both native + web views?

Can you give me the scoop on what is going on in this space?

I recently saw facebook's "react native".

The whole html-inlined-into-your-javascript thing really put me off initially.

Is anyone really using this for their commercial production applications?

Are there other similar competing solutions or technologies worth considering as alternatives?

Thanks! Waka

2 comments

loumf 4012 days ago

ReactNative does not render to web views. It uses web development constructs like CSS, Flexbox, and JavaScript, but the output is the native view hierarchy. Facebook is using it (in Paper, at least)

FaceBook thinks you should use ReactNative for mobile and React for the web -- they call it learn-once-write-anywhere -- the UI code is not portable and that is not a goal of the project.

The only things I know about where you can run in a browser and in a native app are HTML-based and use app-wrapped web-views on mobile. I would look at jQueryMobile and Ionic if you want to go this route. You wrap either in Cordova/PhoneGap.

sharmi 4012 days ago

One such option that I am aware of is kivy[1], though I have not used it. It is a python based application framework library. I am not sure if it is fully mature but I have read good things about it on reddit.

[1] http://kivy.org/#home