One of the big problems with technology is the rapid pace of change. It’s good for users, of course, but it can be a real challenge for developers. That’s not because it’s hard to learn new technology, but because you may end up creating something in a framework that becomes a dead-end. Then, as the Internet moves on, you have to switch your app to a different framework if you want to make use of new technology.
Continue readingSince the next few steps are going to be pretty expensive time-wise (on my part), it’s time to remove some of the options from the table. That should speed up the process, and I don’t think I left any real candidates out.
First, we are going to eliminate those contenders that have a much faster cousin. That means all the combinations with RequireJS will be kept, while their Require-less brethren are kicked out. These are marked as “rq” in the elimination table.
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Well, here it is: the article about performance. I won’t leave you guessing: here is the chart with the results, and all the surprises it entails:
Cautionary tale: given the number of frameworks and the boredom of hitting refresh, I only did ten refreshes per framework. Given the spread of the results (not shown here) that could catapult any framework a few rankings up or down, depending on where it goes. So look at these numbers with enough salt to cause you heart trouble!
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One of the differences between mobile development for sites and for browserified apps is that you don’t have to download the supporting files every time you start. That’s because they are typically packaged with the app and are right there with it on the device.
That’s a huge difference with respect to looking up mobile sites, because there every byte you can squeeze out is a byte you don’t have to download. While that’s not that important on WiFi or on 4G, it makes all the difference on 3G or heavens forbid 2G.
Continue readingIf you are joining us now, this is a multi-part shootout of mobile Javascript frameworks. In the last instalment, we got a series of candidates, 77 long. In this instalment, we will look at functionality.
The Todo app pushed by the TodoMVC team is very simple, but pretty complete. In it you:
Bindings and behaviors were refined further:
Continue readingRight on the heels of the first instalment, here the second, where we will consider the options we have in mobile frameworks.
First of all,** the number of frameworks out there is simply staggering**. There are literally hundreds of them, from industry behemoths like jQueryMobile to one-man projects already abandoned by the creator.
Variety is the spice of life, but too many options make for big headache. Unfortunately, the web has zeroed in on the predicament of mobile developers and offers even more click-bait articles about the “Best Mobile Frameworks 2014” than you can possibly read. Most of them, sadly, consider it a “comparison” when you simply put up the name and the first paragraph of the web site description.
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I am the lucky owner of a brand new Lenovo Y50. It’s a screaming fast machine, with a gorgeous screen (despite what naysayers complain about – mostly the yellows and the refresh rate). It’s meant for gamers, but a developer like me can like it, too. It’s just beautiful, and relatively lightweight, and did I mention it’s screaming fast?
But the big question was: How Do I Set It Up Most Efficiently?
Continue readingNothing is as shockingly disruptive as the perfectly obvious, when carefully examined.
It was the day of the Lord 12 February 1989, such as they count in the Old World. I was in the Old World that day, which I know precisely, because I found a trace of it in my keepsake box. Two days before Valentine’s Day of that year which brought about the Fall of the Iron Curtain, I was sitting in a giant lecture hall at the Rheinish Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen (short, RWTH) for the midterms in Theoretical Quantum Mechanics. In German, that’s called a Klausur, which is the local spelling of a Latin word that means, “sequestration.”
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