Hybrid War Notes from Inside NativeScript Developer Day
The current battle between different mobile technologies, from native to hybrid to progressive web apps, is one of the most interesting debates of our technical time. At stake are enormous financial interests and technical investments. This week, I attended NativeScript Developer Day, a conference organized by Progress, founders of NativeScript, held from Monday to Tuesday (September 18–19) at the Scandinavia House in New York, NY.
The bets on the table are roughly between the following players:
- Native: iOS (Apple) or Android (Google),
- Hybrid: (1) Apache Cordova (Ionic, PhoneGap (now Adobe)), (2) JavaScript-driven Native (ReactNative, NativeScript, Weex (now Apache, originally Alibaba), FuseTools, Flutter), and (3) Platform-driven Native (Xamarin, J2ObjC), and
- Progressive Web Apps (Google).
Maybe because I am originally from Europe, my continental nihilism bleeds over into this ideological debate about competing mobile ideologies. Ultimately, I have not sold my soul to any specific technology and I remain en large technology agnostic. Technologies develop so fast and each new development is one step with its own merit in a long march of innovation. Nevertheless, as mentioned in my previous post, I lean currently toward Progressive Web Apps for the longer term, Ionic on the short term while being interested in ReactNative and NativeScript.
The opening keynote of the NativeScript Developer Day consisted of a collection of high level overviews, respectively by Todd Anglin (Chief Evangelist and VP of Developer Relations at Progress), Rob Lauer (Senior Manager of Developer Relations at Progress), and TJ van Toll (Principal Developer Advocate for Progress). These were no more than a series of product placements and infotainments for Progress, highlighting the new Playground editor and Kinvey, one of the cloud acquisitions by Progress.
As a side note: I have too little tolerance for these type of Steve Jobs style presentations. I should be more empathetic perhaps. Progress is doing great work, and I should grant them their moment of celebration. But the pockets of fanboys that were ooh-ing and ah-ing, applauding every few sentences on cue, is just too much for me. I thought that Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer were something of the past. Jokes do not all of a sudden become funny because you add a laughter track. As a humanist, I am sometimes terribly naive to wish that people think critically and are intrinsically driven. I too easily oversee the deeper human need to belong and be part of something bigger than their own. Anyway, I survived. I should be more tolerant.
The new Playground editor is a great way around some of the bottlenecks of hybrid mobile application development: testing and running your code on a native device. The online Playground editor deploys your code directly to a Playground Preview application on your native device. Another nice feature of the Playground editor is the drag-and-drop visual editor and code generator, similar to the Ionic Creator.
The Kinvey cloud is not immediately one of my favorites. Kinvey is the kind of configuration based product with a tight coupled architecture that I always warn developers against. Decision makers with a business background however till too often, too easily fall in love with such designs. To demo the SalesForce connector out of all connectors, didn’t help (SalesForce! Someone please explain to me how such a horrific product can be so successful?). Coming from a SalesForce world, I can understand the oohs and ahs.
Forrester Wave lists Kinvey as the leader in the Mobile Development Platforms Q416 quadrant for current offering. But it shows the shortsightedness and archaicness of such market analysis reports aimed at non-technical decision makers, because there is technically a lot to critique on Kinvey’s offering with its very tightly coupled design and configuration windows based UI. I have to base my judgment a little bit on the highlights from the keynote, however, so maybe it has merits I will have to take a further look at. Other cloud based platforms considered leaders in the same quadrant like IBM and AWS seem to be architecturally much more in line with developer requirements.
For me, the highlight of the first day definitely was Jeff Whelpley who presented ‘Deep Dive Into to Angular’. Conferences are in general not the place where you will gain your advanced knowledge or skills in anything, so I don’t want to oversell Jeff’s talk, but I do praise him for not chickening out of live coding, which I think still remains the litmus test for any good developer presentation. I learned a thing or two, he had a few helpful plugs for https://medium.com/@bahmutov and https://medium.com/@ladyleet, and he takes a reasonable yet controversial, because little heard, position that the debate about the performance benchmarks for ReactNative and Angular are largely a skewed debate, because with enough effort and tweaking, both will accomplish similar outcomes, and the real debate should be how easy performance is to accomplish.
Whelpley concludes that it is the competition between the different technologies that is the true catalyzer of innovation. I can only encourage this technology agnostic and innovation centric position. It is the collaborative openness and friendly competitiveness in a community that makes open source communities and technologies the winning strategy in technology.
Nevertheless, if you overlook my slightly critical War Notes, I did walk away with a very sympathetic impression of NativeScript. I always liked the architecture of ReactNative and NativeScript, but also have been hesitant to switch given Facebook’s history with the mobile community over Parse and the BSD license that ReactNative is under. Given, that I am already invested in Angular2, I will definitely give NativeScript a try. (Stay tuned…)
