Supersonic: New UI Hybrid Framework – Ionic, AngularJS, Cordova

- Matti, CTO of AppGyver

We didn't embrace Polymer more fully for various reasons (like it being a very WIP project still), but the Polymer web components should all work fine with Supersonic apps.

Disclaimer: AG employee here. :)

However, local builds are on the pipeline – can't give a date yet, but you'll definitely be able to build your AppGyver apps with Xcode/Android Studio. (We'll provide the AppGyver Wrapper code as a library you can include in your project.)

Good point about a whitelabel scanner, though – we'll consider options to make the flow of sharing a prototype/development version even better.

Yeah, it's HTML and JS - but whereas Cordova provides you with one web view to build your app in, Steroids applications have multiple views joined together with native navigation. We ship with a lovely CSS framework by default to make building UIs a snap. The command line features livereload, so your changes can be reflected instantly on the device. And because it's Javascript, you can debug using the tools in Chrome and Safari - a vast improvement over printlns.

You might find this page illustrative: http://www.appgyver.com/supersonic/ui

It uses C# and seems to compile to Native, I haven't delved too deep into it, but it seems like a solid choice.

As an example: unlike e.g. Ionic, our navigation is not built on top of AngularJS, but leverages the native navigation stack instead. Angular can be used to enhance the core Supersonic bits (as we do in many places), but it's not a lock-in.

This means that you can e.g. have your details view running in the device memory even when it's not visible. Then, when you click on a link on your index page, the details view animates into view using a hardware-accelerated, native transition. Same for tabs – switching between them is instant, since no DOM needs to be redrawn. It's a whole separate WebView being brought onto the screen.

Disclaimer: I work for AppGyver.

A Single Page Application will usually consist of any number of logical views handled in a single web browser view. Since the app is Javascript and HTML, everything is loaded in the same runtime environment and switching between views is actually about swapping things in and out of the DOM. We feel that this isn't a very good approach when you're doing mobile applications, not least because everything you do will be an approximation of the native UI capabilities. Companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have famously failed to deliver hybrid mobile apps with a good enough user experience when using the traditional SPA approach.

This is where an MPA architecture comes in useful. As opposed to a single runtime environment in a single web view, multiple web views can be run concurrently and the native layer is used for transitions between them. This is different from both SPAs and traditional server-side architectures which you could call "multi-page" if you squinted a little. Besides the readily felt advantage in user experience, the approach also has architectural benefits which help out in growing your app. When your Javascript runtime is working towards rendering exactly one kind of view instead of dozens, there are radically fewer possible states and thus less issues with global state leaks and the like. In short, it helps make development simpler.

Hope this clarifies. As a dev, I think the ability to leverage multiple concurrent web views is one of the core advantages of the platform.

IMHO, Angular adds too much complexity for small apps, though I could see it may make sense for larger ones.

As regards the article, I'm a bit confused. Ionic is already Angular + Cordova. What does Supersonic add?

I think it's sad that certain people think that a frameworks like WPF or AngularJS are "great" or even "decent enough", it just shows you how abysmal the current state of UI programming really is.

And when it comes to Android devices, AppGyver works with Intel and crosswalk is used to bring unified experience on all devices. Crosswalk is fork of the newest chromium codebase. Check out https://crosswalk-project.org/ for more information about this.

That's also the same kind of situations where you have to freeze the hardware and software versions to keep it working, and in 5 years you still have to keep iOS8 devices running around, like it was done with IE6 in the old days.

I wonder if by the time you get to this stage you wouldn't be better off investing the time in actually learning the native languages and toolsets provided with them. I am also concerned about how much you would be tied into doing things the, in this case, Supersonic way. The scaffolding for example looks interesting, but is it actually useful in a real-world application?

I don't have experience with Supersonic, I do have experience with AngularJS + Cordova mobile apps (I built the front-end of the RuneScape Companion app) - and I think if I were faced with building a similar app again I would think very very carefully about investing time into learning a stack of frameworks such as this.

http://macgyver.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_problems_solved_by_Ma...

Quite often I read the comments mainly for one or for the other. But it's distracting when you want to read comments commenting on THIS framework vs other frameworks to wade through a long initial sub-thread questioning frameworks entirely. :-)

Same happens every time someone posts an ORM article, or a CMS article or anything on Angular.js whatsoever. Oh - and god forbid a Google product announcement might generate a debate on anything other than "Google will just close this down just like they did with Reader".

I've got no objection to the parent's comments - but this type of comment always ends up at the top and dominates the more on-topic stuff further down.

From an engineering perspective, I would inspect the native API bindings and look for / test optimized rewrites of the Cordova runtime. I believe they are getting close to 3x gains over the stock Cordova runtime.

Things are getting ridiculously complicated.