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Comment by prohor | Hacker News Reader

And at the same time another group at Google is working on Singular, again cross platform development for Android, iOS & Web (web is not for Flutter), which works in AnuglarJS-like fashion. There is a difference though, Singular doesn't go into widgets (you should use platform specific). Maybe they will be able to merry them, but I doubt, so we will need to choose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdPP3ldo1ww

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9010424

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I'm cautiously optimistic about Singular; they've "gone dark" and are implementing it internally, which is kind of disappointing.

But for someone (e.g. me) who:

a) thinks the skill set reuse of React Native is genius (reuse the UI framework/mental model, and purposefully not the widgets), but

b) doesn't like Javascript, I think Singular has the best chance at winning my personal mind share.

Of course, "doesn't like Javascript" is a minority mindset these days, so in terms of community/etc. I'm sure React Native is going to be very strong.

In terms of Flutter/Singular, Flutter trying to play the "write one app for N devices" is interesting...AFAIK, that's something React Native/Singular are explicitly trying to avoid, since historically it's resulted in sub-par UIs on each device.

But it would be an interesting coup if material design meant developers (and users) really did want/expect the same exact L&F on both Android and iOS.

I am never basing architecture on small Google projects again. We use app engine which has horrible support and billing. We used to use GWT which is no longer maintained. I just don't trust Googles commitment to anything it releases. They throw stuff against the wall to see if it sticks and I ended up with sludge on the floor one time too many.

> We used to use GWT which is no longer maintained

I understand where you're coming from, but FWIW this is incorrect: Google has a team of ~4-5 engineers still actively making changes to GWT, and even currently prepping/testing a new release.

Interesting, I had not heard of this. Personally I find HTML to be the best layout system there is, besides animations, and I'm not even a web developer. I like Dart, but its not statically typed and Flutter uses its own layout system.

Developing native GUIs since the mid-90's, I think there have been quite a few better solutions.

And those "few better solutions" would be?

- XAML

- XUL

- Layout managers like Motif, Swing, Tk, ...

I never had with them half the problems I do have making HTML/CSS work properly across browsers.

...well you wouldn't have those problems with XML tags/HTML being used in an app with a framework that uses a custom layout system.

But that isn't the W3C way anymore.

True, the XHTML + XML modules would have brought us there, but another path was chosen.

Swing didn't have baseline alignment until Java 1.5 iirc, so you couldn't put a label next to a text box without it looking dorky. And the controls felt slightly uncanny on every platform.

No thanks, wouldn't buy again.

Swing is great if one bothers to learn how to use it, instead of relying on the default control behaviours.

What I mean by that, was being aware information like "Filthy Rich Clients" blog, http://filthyrichclients.org/

I have been out of the CSS loop in the last three years.

Can we finally center vertically without lots of tricks in a good way across browsers?

I am not a designer and never managed to control layout in HTML/CSS, as easily as, I do in all the native toolkits I have used thus far.

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