Our selection of 5 efficient frameworks to build digital applications.
To build your digital applications, you have to select which channels to address. Two years ago, when mobile traffic became higher than desktop, native applications were the obvious choice. However, with more os and IOT devices, cross-channel apps have now become a must-have.
With some frameworks, you can build cross-channel digital applications. While they require some learning curve, these frameworks deliver more sustainable applications, with less maintenance costs.
1. Ionic
Ionic stands for one of the best application framework.
The free edition, under a MIT opensource licence, onboards a powerful set of tools to build your cross-platforms applications.
Ionic offers a complete documentation to dig deeper into the framework. In addition, it onboards full design capabilities through CSS3.
Also, the native Ionic API works with a large number of platforms. Consequently this framework is a good choice for integrating apps into existing ecosystems.
2. Flutter
Pretty recent framework, Flutter is made by Google and based on Google’s portable UI toolkit.
Impressions on Flutter:
– Google UI toolkit guarantees lightweight and fast applications
– requires some hands on code
– documentation is not fully complete yet, as Flutter is recent
3. Angular
This framework is the natural follow up on Angular JS. It onboards both HTML5, Bootstrap and Angular JS for cross-platform applications.
Feedback on Angular UI:
– if you’re familiar with Angular JS approach, then this framework is the best option
– it’s an open-source project, highly active on GitHub with detailed documentation
– it’s probably the most seo-friendly framework (originating from Google)
4. React-native
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/
Another “big” framework. React-native is the background framework used for Facebook and Instagram.
Feedback on React-native:
– it’s java-script based, so React-Native has become a popular framework
– it’s a question of taste actually, but the UI options of React-native are not as advanced. The layout props look flexible but playing with them to come to an intuitive app will require more than coding.
– the framework is not well-documented, and there is still some instability
5. Xamarin
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/xamarin/
Microsoft-owned framework, Xamarin is on the market since 2011.
Feedback on Xamarin:
– since its inception, Xamarin has focused on performance, making hardware compatibility and near-to-native app performance a priority
– development cycle are fast, since code is re-usable for other apps
– UI coding requires unplanned additional time
– Xamarin onboards lots of references which calls can slow down the loading of your apps
