Building native apps for both the Android & iOS platforms means having to master 2 different development environments as well as the hassle involved in maintaining 2 different code bases. With Weex, you can build real mobile apps using HTML, CSS & JavaScript & output an app core based on native code: Objective-C or Java.
Unlike other unified mobile platforms, Weex does not simply let you produce “Web apps” or HTML5/hybrid apps. It gives you the ability to produce real native cross-platform apps that work on the major smartphone OS, from Google & Apple, as well as on the Web.
The apps developed with Weex use the same API development functions regardless of where they wind up running & Weex provides a rich extension of the native interfaces. This adds convenience for extending native components or modules.
It’s very similar in this to ‘React Native’, which lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript, but Weex uses Vue.js instead. Vue.js is optimized for building user interfaces & for speed & UI development, due to its focus on the view layer. It’s modular & very easy to integrate with other libraries or existing projects.
To work with Weex, a developer just needs to write an app as if he’s writing a Web page & then compile the app into some JavaScript known as the Weex JS bundle.
Weex appears to be a client-side technology, but actually connects all the way from the local dev environment to the cloud platform & distribution. The JS bundle can be deployed in the cloud & it can be pre-fetched or requested via the WeexSDK from a mobile app.
A JavaScript engine will run the JS bundle any time a user opens a Weex page & the bundle will make calls to the native-side through the Weex JS bridge, which allows for rendering the UI or handling user interactions, I/O, comms, etc.
If you’d rather deploy the app via the Web, you can use the same web page in a browser using the same code. It should be remarked that the local development environment is the same as you’d use for web development, so there is practically no learning curve involved for developers already working on web projects, other than learning the Vue.js front-end framework.
Weex is an Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Incubator project, & as such is free & open source software available under a very liberal use license.
– This is a startup profile based on publicly available material & not a review –
Image Credit: Weex
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