We started this blog to give you insights to our brain and hard disks. We wanted to discuss trending topics and provide solutions and ideas on challenging projects and tasks we are working on. We still do this and get better every day, but working on these tasks reduces time available for writing quality blog posts as they consume several hours creating the assets. This is the reason we come up with this brand new category:”Our latest findings”. During our journey through the web we often find awesome content and want to share it with you to inspire you the same way we got inspired.
As usual feedback is welcome, but now let’s get started:
Hybrid apps: Hybrid apps are a thing for several years now. Starting with phone gap, the idea was to write code once and deploy it everywhere: iOS, android, web. To solve the problem of missing apis in the web, phone gap combined native functionality with web functionality to make this happen. Hybrid apps still have their use cases and with the experience of these apps to new approaches have emerged: PWAs from Google and building business logic with web tools with a native ui layer (i.e. react native or native script). These two articles provide a lot of awesome knowledge about these approaches:
- http://developer.telerik.com/featured/diminishing-use-case-hybrid-apps/
- https://medium.com/javascript-scene/why-native-apps-really-are-doomed-native-apps-are-doomed-pt-2-e035b43170e9#.ao2x5e4d7
Development stack: We cannot imagine crafting a pwa without webpack. Once one understood the concept, it is so easy to manage all frontend assets like images, icons, svg, fonts, templates… or to make it short REALLY EVERYTHING. It takes care to optimizing and minimizing code and even removes unused code branches. One can manage all dependencies automatically via bower or npm without changing a line of code. And the best news, it’s still advancing: With webpack 2 tree shaking becomes available to further improve the size of the final js code as well as best practices such as performance-budgets are introduced:
- https://moduscreate.com/webpack-2-tree-shaking-configuration/
- https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-performance-budgets-13d4880fbf6d#.5o0eoxish
Tooling: Every time one has a new requirement, like connecting to a new service or database chances are very high that someone before had the same requirement, wrote a lib and published it. Depending on your dependency management you probably have established a way to discover those libs and put it under review if it fits your requirements, too. But what about reliability, code quality and future development. In our case we mostly use npm for frontend and backend libs. Almost 100% have a public github repo, where everybody can perform their own checks, like how many stars does it have? Does it contain tests? Is there a CI pipeline set up? And so on… These are some easy to check metrics, which might give you an idea of the quality of this project. But how active is the developer team? Will it receive new features and bugfixes? How does it compare to similar projects? There is a site, which tries to answer these questions:
Read! Enjoy! Get inspired, and let us know what your “latest findings” are.