We are designing a generic Android application using Xamarin Forms. At the same time, we need some texts that the user enters to be treated a bit differently for some of the customers, ie. run them through a custom transformation.
Instead of having to build a different version of our generic app, it would be great if we could define those transformations as an external dependency, as a pluggable "dll" or a text file with a script, maybe something like MoonSharp.
Does anyone have experience with something similar and how to achieve that in Xamarin Forms?
We did end up using the MoonSharp framework and the Lua scripting in two different projects, one on Xamarin, and another one on a classic windows service C# application. It was a great tool and gets the job done!
I'm contemplating on using React Native for a new web app. Is it possible to ship both iOS and Android apps using it?
I know that it's on the roadmap, but it's unclear to me whether it's going to be a separate open-source project (e.g., React Android vs React Native), or just one (e.g., React Native).
TLDR: Most likely you can. But it depends on your use cases.
You can aim for about 80~99+% code reuse (depending on how much Android/iOS native views/modules you use eg. Do you have custom graphics code or low-level TCP networking code; Those can only be done in native code; And expose as API to your JS code. The amount of the platform-specific JS code is actually minimal. Plus you can also use platform check like if (Platform.OS === 'android'){} to solve that) of code reuse, which is pretty nice. Dropbox and other companies have done similar projects: using c++ to build a 'shared' component between iOS and Android project, while implementing most of the UI code in native iOS(Objective-c or swift) and Android(java). But now you are doing C++ with Java and Objective-C or Swift, more language to master, more complexity and more brain juice went down the drain. And it probably took some super tough gymnastic move to make different native code work in both iOS and Android, plus debugging...
React Native just makes it a lot easier to write almost everything in JavaScript. But there is a catch, only about 80% of the JS code could be shared. In the foreseeable future, you still need to write 'platform-specific' JS code for Android and iOS versions.
That's why FB said they aim for 'Learn once, code anywhere' instead of 'run' everywhere.
But it's still very nice other than code reuse(80+% code reuse is still a big improvement comparing to maintaining 2 entirely different versions: Android and iOS ya?)
Cmd +R to refresh the app is a GREAT boost for development speed. Waiting for a big project to compile just makes you felt you were dying inside.
Declarative UI you get for free, because of using React. This is another great plus! As you don't need to 'dig' into your specific UI code that often anymore. Data changed? Just 'flush' it and UI just update accordingly. No brain juice wasted.
I just ported my not so complicated Android React Native App to iOS. And it took me 3 days. The request for and iOS version for the App came as a rather abrupt and unplanned move. So could definitely be even faster had I built the Android with a plan for iOS too. Huge win:)
Another great benefit is able to do hot code push without going through the hellish 1 week app store review process. So no more, "YAY, our app is approved. Let's release. Oh Shiiit. Critical bug and our app keeps crashing(that's gonna keep happening for at least a week before your fix is live). And you have to beg Apple to speed up the process". This is possible because the major part of the code base would be written in JS and with tools like AppHub or CodePush, you could almost instantly deploy code to your users. This is conditionally allowed by Apple.
3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code, and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple's built-in WebKit framework, provided that such scripts and code do not change the primary purpose of the Application by providing features or functionality that are inconsistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application as submitted to the App Store.
Lastly, as an open-source project, project longevity tends to be a concern. Not an issue for React Native. Internally used by(FB Ads Manager) and backed by FB(a dozen FB Engineers?) by Facebook, with close to 500 contributors and 25k Stars, React Native is full of life. Seeing is believing :) (https://github.com/facebook/react-native)
EDIT 1
I realized that I am apparently a bit biased and only talked about the good stuff about React Native. So do checkout https://productpains.com/product/react-native/ and Github issues to have a full picture. It's definitely not silver bullet. That being said, it satisfies most of my use case and I couldn't see me use native iOS or Android anytime soon.
EDIT 2
The Facebook F8 conference app released by Facebook (duh..) is 100% open source and they have a really nice tutorial to show you how you could have both iOS and Android native experience(90% as good as native ?), and at the same time, achieved 85% code re-use. check it out --> https://makeitopen.com
EDIT 3
You may also want to checkout Flutter and its pros & cons :)
It doesn't make sense to have a single codebase if you want a truly native experience. At the moment we have things like NavigatorIOS in React Native which provides an iOS-style UI for navigating between app screens, but if we were to just start using that on Android it wouldn't feel like a true Android app.
Therefore I'd expect to see a NavigatorAndroid component or similar when the time comes, and the same for various other components that behave differently between the platforms.
One benefit that you would get is that any application logic - maybe a store, or your backend interactions - could be written in a JavaScript file and then included by both iOS and Android.
So while you won't get that write-once run-everywhere developer experience from React Native I would expect to see a solution that gives first-class UI on both platforms while encouraging as much reuse as possible. I personally also hope to see strong build tools to help develop and ship on multiple platforms.
React Native for Android has just been released, Android folder will be creating along side with iOS folder upon creating a new project.
Just another tip as NavigatorIOS was mentioned. Facebook are not really maintaining the code for NavigatorIOS. Instead they are focusing on Navigator.
Yes. We're running it in production with about 5m registered users.
Some things are a little behind iOS but catching up quickly. It's a good wagon to be on.
React Native is designed so that you can deploy to both iOS and Android. There is a caveat, of course.
React Native has supported iOS for much longer, coming to Android only recently. So, there are some differences in terms of what is supported on each platform.
For example, if you place borders on Text, they will show up on iOS, but not on Android. In order to overcome this, you need to place a View around the Text, and apply a border to that. Luckily, React Native makes it easy to integrate separate stylesheets for each platform (or even platform-specific styling on a single stylesheet).
Support for Android is continuously evolving, so it will only be a matter of time before React Native for Android is on par with iOS. Nevertheless, this shouldn't deter you. In my experience, it's a great way to quickly develop for both platforms, and it does save some headaches.
you don't need to maintenance separate code base for android & ios. Actually you can use same code base for build android & ios. I recommend to read the react-native documentation(according to react-native version you are using) before using any inbuilt component in your code.
Eg:- TextInput component onKeyPress function supports for ios only.
if ur are using external lib check these lib support for both ios and android.
Anyway you have to configure external lib separately(install) both android and ios.
hope this will helpful.
I want to build a stock chart, but do not know which library I should use.
Can any library build the dynamic chart to be the background of the view？Thank you.
It's worth checking out SciChart, which has a very powerful iOS & Android Stock Chart control.
It is a commercial component, however it is a very fast and powerful chart library which beats MPAndroidChart by a very clear margin in performance tests. Sorry MPAndroidChart!
You can now clone the Android Chart examples on Github and have a play around with the controls and see how we created the above example app!
Full disclosure - I am the tech lead on the SciChart project
You can use this lib-https://github.com/PhilJay/MPAndroidChart.I used it for one of my projects.
If the requirements seems to be simple enough you could also try to write your own graph.Its pretty simple to do it in android.
In my application in Windows Phone, i have made a custom plotting library for some simple plotting of a graph. I did this, using System.Windows.Shapes. Now i run to some problems when i want to use this on other platforms (android, and iphone, using mono).
So i came to the conclusion that i may need to remake te library using System.Drawing only. Because that namespace is available on all three platforms, and (if i have googled correctly) contains some functionally in drawing stuff on ui's.
My Questions
Am i correct in the fact that drawing contains drawing functions.. If so, how do i make a multi point line or polyLine?
Are there any (allready available) libraries that do the same using the System.Drawing namespace only?
If there are any plotting libraries that are available for only Android an MonoTouch than that will do aswell, because i've allready got a graph drawing function on my windowsphone, This will be my last resort. Because i want to keep the code behind the platforms mostly the same.
What i found out:
After some time put in to searching for an answer for this, i gave op hope to find libraries that implement a graph functionality for all the three platforms. There just doesn't seem to be one. There are libraries available for Silverlight and Monotouch(IOS) but, the silverlight part is NOT compatible with windows phone.
I found out that the library system.drawing does not have full functionality in silverlight, so after some careful consideration I also stepped away from that idea. And Moved towards making my own library that implements some #if (SILVERLIGHT) or #if (MONOTOUCH) region functionality.
At this point i have made my own library for WindowsPhone being able to draw a decent plain and simple graph. I eventualy done this using the System.Windows.Shapes namespace. Today i will start making the same sort of lib for android. And after that i will do it for windowsphone, The library will be open source, and when finished i think i will release it somewhere.
As a sort of summary: "there was not a real answer to my question, so
i had to work around it. This work around made me make my own cross
platform library
".
I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask this question so if it isn't please let me know and I will move it. I am looking to create a game for both Android and iPhone platform. I know Unity is a great game engine and my question is how well does it work for creating one code base to build for both Android and iPhone platforms? Time is a constraint on this project so I am very interested in how smoothly the process usually is when trying to build both applications and how much custom code must be written for each specific application. Any insite that people have on this topic would be much appreciated thanks.
Unity, as implied by it's very name, is designed explicitly to facilitate such multi-platform development in little time. You can for example define for each platform what the max size of each texture is, and it will automatically resize them for you when you build for that target platform - the build process really simple too. Since both your platforms are touch devices, it should be easy to have just one code base working seamlessly for both platforms (and more if needed), with very few custom code for each platform.
Unity has a no-questions-asked 30 day trial of the Android and (I think) iOS versions - I encourage you to try them and see for yourself how little time it will take you to have a proof of concept build for both platforms.