Pepperoni – A framework to build apps faster, powered by React Native | Hacker News Reader

Pepperoni – A framework to build apps faster, powered by React Native

getpepperoni.com

136 pointskimmobru41 comments

It'd be great if they showed a screenshot from a hello world app or something. It's really hard to actually know what they mean when they use words I think I understand.

maybe the code example or hello world is on another page, but if cross platform rapid app development is the core value prop, they need to put it front and center based on their audience - app developers.

all the landing page gives me now are fancy framework words with no APIs and a picture of a pizza.

I forwarded this to the main contributors, thanks for the good feedback. Pepperoni is more of a starter kit to kickstart your React Native development as fast as possible. You get the redux architecture and other solid pieces but there's no internal framework API. I hope that explained the core idea.

That idea is explained well, but I agree with OP in that a working example would do wonders.

Is this a boilerplate repo that I should clone and build off of? Is this a project generator like rake? Is this a library I should npm install to depend on?

How do I actually use it?

I agree with this. The page says it's a framework, but I feel like it's describing a kickstarter/generator. That said, I will bookmark Pepperoni and give it a go during the weekend, it looks interesting.

Thanks for your interest! It's definitely more of a project boilerplate. We have big ideas for the future, but starting out small.

Thanks for the notes on the mixed messaging, we'll tweak the website to be more informative.

Thanks for the feedback! One of our team members is working on a sample app, launching as soon as it's done :) We didn't want to delay the release until "everything" was complete, in order to gather input such as yours. If you're interested on learning when the sample app is released, please subscribe to our mailing list and we'll let you know!

Has anyone else noticed the trend at over-marketed "frameworks" like this with fancy graphics, lots of use of logos, etc?

Maybe I'm just getting old by anymore I have a feeling of "ugh" set in when seeing that page.

So a designer and developer were passionate enough about a framework to make a website about it. What about that bothers you? If you like the framework, and a professional website result in more people using it, then you win out. If you don't, then don't use it. Life goes on.

The fact that the site doesn't tell anything about the framework, nor it showcases it. It's megabytes and scrolling for nothing except a actual paragraph of content. [1]

[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

447KB transferred.

It is very simple: the website looks childish. It communicates that this tool is not supposed to be used for serious work.

Serious Frameworks Only, eh?

Serious Games.

Helps me create a mental hook. Why 'ugh' ?

And I think it's great that designers are giving fruits of their labor for free towards FOSS.

No. I'm looking for exactly something like this. I'm glad it's a "bootstrap", not yet another framework. I want to try React Native but have been having trouble getting started. And I would like something with a little bit of polish.

Please take a look and let us know if you run into issues! We've just launched Pepperoni, and it's not yet as polished as we want it to be, but we'll be there soon.

For comparison's sake, check out https://github.com/bartonhammond/snowflake - it's quite similar to Pepperoni, and at this moment a bit more mature.

In the long term we want to make Pepperoni more comprehensive, documented and stable. We have some different opinions compared to Snowflake's - that's why we are building our own. A topic worth a blog post, though, too long to expand here and now.

Someone should just track the number of frameworks that get publicized on hacker news, and how quickly they die. I like this idea, but then again I've liked a lot of them.

I'm justing starting out as an iOS developer. I wonder how the growing popularity around React Native will impact native development. I mean Futurice for example doesn't have a shortage of good iOS developers looking at their best practice guides and all.

That's the life of a developer, I'd say. Frameworks, languages and platforms come and go, so planning for the far-away future doesn't make much sense. It's much more important to grasp the core concepts, learn quickly, and keep the interest in continuous skill set development.

How back-end agnostic is it? The most likely case for me is that a back-end would already exists (or I'd be building one with Django Rest Framework)

Pepperoni App Kit is going be fully backend agnostic - we haven't implemented all the bits yet, but the only assumption we will be making is that your data is JSON served over HTTP, using JWT authentication - and the authentication bit can be easily changed.

We are also going to implement a Pepperoni Backend Kit, based on node.js. The App Kit will not require you to use that backend, though.

This looks fantastic, just what I've been looking for. Curious to know why there doesn't seem to be any mention of fastlane [1]? I think every boilerplate mobile project should definitely include an example fastlane setup.

[1]: https://fastlane.tools/

We looked at Fastlane and thought it looks very interesting, but because we didn't have personal experience with it, we decided to go with what we know: Bitrise for the CI, CodePush for the app live updates.

We would love see contributions that add Fastlane configurations though. If you're interested in helping out, please open a GitHub issue and let's discuss what should be done.

What about Cycle Native?

I'm one of the authors of Pepperoni, as well as contributor to Cycle Native. I would love to see Cycle.js become a first class citizen of the React Native ecosystem.

At CycleConf last month we hacked around improving the Cycle/RN interop and solving a few of the big problems that prevented using Cycle Native for real apps, and ended up rewriting most of the Cycle Native internals. Our work is not yet fully merged to the official repo, needs a bit of cleanup before we can do that.

The work in progress is here: https://github.com/jevakallio/cycle-react-native

Correction to the previous: The CycleConf changes are now part of the official cycle-react-native repo: https://github.com/cyclejs/cycle-react-native

whenever I had to compare Angularjs vs React the one key difference is that the former has ionic and the latter has React Native, to get performance non-critical out quick Ionic seems to be much easy to use comparing to React Native. I wish someone can produce a similar project on top of React-Native(or whatever modules they choose) soon.

Angular 2 has Ionic & React native ;)

Does 'futurice' rhyme with 'uterus' or how the heck to do you pronounce that name?

Haha, I work at Futurice, and I wish I knew the answer to that question :)

Here in the UK it rhymes with Avarice. In Finland it's more like Future Rice.

There's no consensus even within the company. Fortunately we're primarily the types who avoid social situations where you cannot communicate by typing.

What about Relay and graphQL?

Great question! We are investigating adding Relay support, as well as a PostGraphQL endpoint (Postgres+GraphQL) to the soon upcoming Pepperoni Backend Kit.

Right now we've included what we know works well, and we don't yet have experience with Relay in React Native apps. Contributions welcome, though :)

Now to start them faster!

Pepperoni is the worst kind of Pizza.

It took a while to find the "getting started" page:

https://github.com/futurice/pepperoni-app-kit/blob/master/do...

Ultimately, I'm rooting for libui[1] over React Native or anything related to it. But the more competition, the better, since competition seems to usually drive innovation.

You know, it's kind of funny how we've come full circle. 15-20 years ago, developers were experimenting with all sorts of new GUI ideas.

I remember using a program that had something that looked like scrollbars, but the mouse's scroll-wheel wouldn't work on them, and you couldn't drag them either, you could only scroll by clicking the arrow buttons on the top and bottom. But man, it looked super sleek, like it came straight out of the movie Aliens or something!

And now we're doing the same thing. Reinventing GUI so that it's pretty, but ends up being broken. I wish I could find that one tweet from a year ago or so, where someone said that scrolling a certain web page triggered no less than something like 67 animations.

[1] https://github.com/andlabs/libui

aren't they totally different? libui is more of a "legacy/desktop" UI method with a C-API, while React-Native is for web/apps.

They are, I can't really see anything in common in the platforms these two target.

They have the same goals.

From React-Native's website:

> React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about — learn once, write anywhere.

From libui's website:

> Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.

They're both cross-platform GUI libraries. They take different approaches, but they aim to do the same basic thing: let you write cross platform desktop apps more easily.

> but they aim to do the same basic thing: let you write cross platform desktop apps more easily.

No, that's not correct. React Native is mobile platforms only (iOS and Android now, perhaps Windows and Tizen later), while libui is desktop only.

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