Time is money. Developers value their time, so they tend to seek the quickest and the most reliable way of creating their solutions. Cross-platform frameworks are there to help. They allow developing applications that are compatible with multiple platforms.
But of course, life is not that easy. Some frameworks may spice up the whole process of development significantly. Especially while creating a codebase that will run smoothly on any operating system. It may turn out to be a challenge even for an experienced developer. That is why it is crucial to choose an appropriate cross-platform framework carefully.
Luckily, the market is rich in options nowadays. We have prepared the following overview of the modern frameworks worth paying attention to. This overview will come in handy when you decide to make a choice.
This product has been existing on the market since 2013. XBSoftware software house is responsible for its development and maintenance. Today Webix contains 100 + UI widgets that you can use to create any business application. The Webix set includes such SAP applications as File Manager, Document Manager, User Manager, Chat-Messenger, Task Manager (Kanban), Pivot JS, Spreadsheet, SQL Query. According to the reviews the library is considered to be a simple and elegant framework that facilitates the process of prototyping and developing the UI layer of the application as much as possible. Webix contains helpful features that make the development and prototyping of the UI interface for business applications easy and fast. Predefined content in combination with professional material design skin allows you to create ready-made applications using a few lines of code (here is an example). Detailed documentation contributes to the list of advantages of this framework.
Sencha
This project has already earned the respect of a huge number of developers. Sencha Ext JS once completely dominated the UI library market. Today, it cannot boast such a strong position. Reviews mark excessive complexity and noticeable performance problems. Provided you have several mature Ext JS developers in your team, you can safely start your project. Excellent documentation, many programming samples, and a functional UI library will help you. A great advantage of this solution is the specialized packages for integration with Angular and React frameworks.
Jquery
It is one of the oldest and probably the most popular UI libraries. Many UI products were formed on its basis; besides, it gave rise to a whole class of JavaScript libraries. With the release of HTML5 JQuery UI made it possible to solve numerous UI cases. It remains a great tool for practicing and rapid prototyping. Some unique controls of this library are still in great demand among developers today.
Vaadin
This is a full-featured Java-based framework that allows you to develop multi-platform solutions. Its main feature is the Java-based UI library. This is a fascinating approach that allows developers to fully create both back-end and front-end in Java. This framework will require developers to be highly qualified and impose some restrictions on the system platform. But the elegant implementation of the UI library allows Java developers to create a UI layer themselves without involving front-end developers.
Meteor
It is an open-source platform used by over half a million developers around the world. Meteor is a full-stack JS app platform that assembles the pieces you need for your solution with a single codebase. Angular and React are easily compatible with Meteor. This framework maintains the data flow between cloud and client applications, as well as client UI state and rendering regardless of which UI framework you use. Meteor is used to easily create iOS and Android apps. The apps are high-quality, and they run a mix of web and native code. It is free to use and available under the MIT license. The tutorials are help study the framework.
Backbone JS
Backbone.js gives structure to web applications and connects them to the existing API over a RESTful JSON interface. It provides models with key-value binding and custom events. The framework offers a vast collection of numerable functions and views with declarative event handling. The project is hosted on GitHub, and the annotated source code is available, as well as an online test suite, an example application, a list of tutorials, and a long list of real-world projects that use Backbone. Backbone is available for use under the MIT software license.
Ember JS
Ember offers an out-of-the-box experience. Ember apps come with a built-in development environment with fast rebuilds, auto-reload, and a test runner. This framework claims to provide developers with ES6 classes, arrow functions, and decorators. It supports TypeScript. Tools like Prettier also perfectly match Ember apps’ JS code. Ember Observer tool helps to deal with projects’ dependencies assessment. To make it possible there are metrics like great documentation, recent releases, and automated tests across multiple Ember versions.
Tabris JS
Tabris allows creating native UIs from a single code base in JavaScript or TypeScript. It does not use WebViews for rendering, so it is possible to employ JS libraries, node modules, and Cordova plugins. It is simple to create graphs or access device features with this framework. Tabris can be helpful when dealing with sensitive data. Tabris.js secure runtime can be built into existing mobile apps as a secure vault. The service is online and available on GitHub under a BSD license.
Fuse JS
Fuse.js is a powerful, lightweight fuzzy-search library, with zero dependencies. Fuzzy searching is the technique of finding strings that are almost equal to a given pattern. With Fuse.js, you don’t need to set up a dedicated backend just to handle the search. The library is simple in use and quite performative. It will be beneficial when you want client-side fuzzy searching of small to moderately large data sets.
OnSen UI
This framework is relatively new on the market. At the same time, it has already gained a competitive reputation. It is known for the ability to turn the front end development into a trifle. It implements HTML5 and JavaScript and allows you to make your app go native via the PhoneGap and Cordova. OnSen is available under the Apache license.
To sum up
Native applications do undoubtedly have their benefits. But unfortunately, it is difficult for them to compete with cross-platform application development frameworks in terms of time and costs. Nowadays developers more often opt for something fast and easily compatible. That is why cross-platform development will only gain its popularity in the coming years.
