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Comment by makeramen | Hacker News Reader

From my conversations with iOS developers, those libraries don't come close to the robustness and simplicity of equivalent java/android libraries like retrofit, gson/jackson, coupled with RxJava... Etc.

I do think a large part of that is due to lack of generics that allow the code to recursively deserialize nested classes and collections without any extra boilerplate other than the class definitions.

I know for a fact that mantle just can't do that with obj c in its current form.

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>I do think a large part of that is due to lack of generics that allow the code to recursively deserialize nested classes and collections without any extra boilerplate other than the class definitions.

Huh? Completely automatic serialization (called activation/passivation) was in the original Stepstone Objective-C, described in Brad Cox's book[1]. No generics required at all, just a modicum of introspection.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Programming-An-Evoluti...

Came here to post a similar comment. Two of his bullet points:

  Automated RESTful APIs
  Expressive Triggers & Responses

are actually already addressed very nicely by some of the third party libraries available for Java. You're exactly right that the combination of typed collections and annotations makes this much easier in Java. If you lay out your model classes properly then JSON serialization/deserialization is a one-liner.

And his third point, the complexity of auto layout, is much less of an issue with Android's layout system, which is much saner for the typical kinds of grid layouts you encounter in real apps.

This is why I've always had a hard time understanding why people say building Android apps is harder than iOS. Sure you have to support a wider variety of devices and dealing with low-level stuff like GL shaders or the camera can be painful. But for typical apps that are basically just list views into some kind of backend data store Android is way easier, IMO. And with the recent proliferation of iOS device sizes and aspect ratios the days of drag & drop UI in iOS are long gone.

"with the recent proliferation of iOS device sizes and aspect ratios the days of drag & drop UI in iOS are long gone"

This casual false statement makes the rest of your comment seem very questionable.

I take it you're not an iOS developer? If you're not building responsive UIs with auto layout you're doing it wrong and doing it right is way harder than it was back in the golden era of photoshop-based pixel perfect designs.

Actually I am an iOS developer, and it's much easier to make a responsive UI using autolayout than it ever was to translate someone's photoshop into a pixel-perfect UI, especially if your product is being developed iteratively and is actually subject to change.

Development for iOS has become much easier over time.

You're the first person I've heard say that. It's much better than it was but it's still the most write-only layout system I've encountered in many many years of building UIs on all kinds of platforms. I'm finding all kinds of broken UI in published iOS apps now. iOS apps used to be easier because they didn't need to be responsive. Android used to get a lot of jeers because Android devs had to deal with these issues from day one.

> Android used to get a lot of jeers because Android Dwvs had to deal with these issues from day one.

No. The jeering was because Android Dev's didnt deal with these issues and so the apps were just blown up in size, and not responsive.

That applied to tablet apps only, which Android devs justifiably ignored. Android devs never had the luxury of assuming devices were of any particular point size, which is something iOS devs did habitually until now.

Perhaps that 'justifiable' ignoring of tablet apps by Android devs is what led to the total failure of Android tablets.

I'm just a beginner iOS developer and I'm trying to learn Android. Could you give the names of these Android Libraries ?

Start with the stuff from Square:

http://square.github.io

And also GSON from Google.

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