Month: November 2018

Check out the State of JavaScript Report for 2018

The yearly “State of JavaScript” report has come out. It’s a survey of over twenty thousand developers and this year’s survey is beautiful in terms of visualization and succinctness.

The results of this year’s survey show through amazing periodic table type of charts with conclusions through quadrant charts. Conclusion pages are the best way to quickly get through the survey though it’s certainly worthwhile to savor it by going through all of it.

If you have limited time then check out the wonderful summaries:

• JavaScript Flavors: https://2018.stateofjs.com/javascript-flavors/conclusion/
• Front-end Frameworks: https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/conclusion/
  • Svelte is an interesting one: https://svelte.technology/
  • Vue.js is definitely worthwhile if you’re not in React land (though there’s nothing wrong with React)
• Data layer: https://2018.stateofjs.com/data-layer/conclusion/
• Back-end Frameworks: https://2018.stateofjs.com/back-end-frameworks/conclusion/
• Testing: https://2018.stateofjs.com/testing/conclusion/
• Mobile and Desktop: https://2018.stateofjs.com/mobile-and-desktop/conclusion/
• Other Tools (Python as a language seems to be the winner here): https://2018.stateofjs.com/other-tools/
• The Opinion page is both interesting and funny: https://2018.stateofjs.com/opinions/
• A neat game-show like reveal on the Awards page: https://2018.stateofjs.com/awards/
• The short over-all Conclusion page covers the rate of change in JavaScript GraphQL’s ascendence: https://2018.stateofjs.com/conclusion/

Google’s Flutter SDK and the Holy Grail of Mobile Cross-platform Development

In software development, there is this holy grail of write once, run everywhere. The goal is to write one piece of code that runs in an optimized way (code/compile/UI efficiency) on different hardware. Recent emphasis on Mobile-first design has shifted this pursuit to cross-platform mobile development.

Flutter is an open-source mobile application development SDK created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android and iOS, as well as being the primary method of creating applications for Google Fuchsia.

The long and short of it is that this is a cross-platform development environment/language. Its biggest competitor is React Native.

I’ve come across an excellent article by Marco Bellinaso covering his learning and use of Flutter: “Flutter: the good, the bad and the ugly”. This article is great in that it pulls no punches and it provides resources to anyone that’s interested in learning and using Flutter.

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