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The web and mobile app development market is full of a variety of technologies. Which one is better? How to choose a team with the right technology stack? In this article, experts from the American company RexSoft will help you answer all these questions.
Flutter
Flutter is a cross-platform solution that allows you to create applications for web, Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows, and Google Fuchsia using one code base and one programming language – Dart.
Essentially, Flutter is the answer to the comparative complexity of modern web development. You need to know at least three languages: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Learning the React, Angular, or Vue framework is added to create dynamic pages. You need Webpack to build a project, and NPM (or Yarn), a package manager, to download and install modules. To add strict typing to your JavaScript code, you need to add TypeScript. It takes time to learn all these technologies.
Flutter offers a very different approach to web development. Flutter uses the HTML canvas to render the pages. The code in Dart is compiled into JavaScript using the dart2js library.
Flutter actually controls every pixel displayed on the screen and does not use HTML, JavaScript, or CSS for styling or logic. This means complete cross-browser compatibility – in all browsers your Flutter application will look the same.
Using a common language for styling, dynamics and business logic in web development reduces the number of resources required to create applications.
In mobile development, working on Flutter significantly reduces project costs as a single codebase can be used for all platforms. The tester team is also reduced accordingly. If you have flutter app developers the development process will be a walk in a park.
React Native
React Native is one of the in-demand open source frameworks developed by Facebook. The tool is quite young, so not many programmers have mastered all the nuances of working with the framework. The primary task of React Native is the cross-platform creation of applications for smartphones.
The React Native framework allows you to release complete native React components. In the past, when React was not yet available, developers wrote mobile apps in HTML5. Such applications ran in an embedded WebView mini-browser, which was enclosed in a shell. This approach worked, but it had a lot of disadvantages: slow speed, lack of ability to use the device’s internal resources, high RAM consumption, and other problems that severely limited the apps’ capabilities.
Using the React Native framework solves all of these problems. React components allow you to develop any application, except resource-intensive games. However, React Native copes with animation of low and medium complexity, which allows you to implement various visual effects in the software product.
React Native is a system with universal tools for iOS and Android platforms. Using the framework significantly reduces the time to create an application, allows you to quickly make adjustments to the application on all platforms simultaneously. Therefore, the support of the application can be more convenient, especially if you have a team of specialists at your disposal.
Node.js
Node.js is a cross-platform, open-source Javascript execution environment developed in V8 Chrome’s JavaScript. It is a lightweight environment used to develop server-side web applications.
Node.js is mainly used to create large-scale applications, mostly for streaming websites, single-page, and other web applications.
Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model, which makes it suitable for applications handling large amounts of real-time data.
Because the Node.js technology is fairly future-proof, it incorporates a lot of very useful concepts. For example, in Node.js you can make lightweight REST / JSON interfaces, which greatly speeds up the development.
This Node.js development platform is a godsend for the fast modern web as it allows to do a lot of operations on the browser side, reuse code, handle thousands of requests and in general, the response from the server is very fast.
Huge projects are already made or transferred to Node.js, for example, LinkedIn, Walmart, PayPal, and others use JS and Node.js completely or partially.
Node.js also supports integrations with Vue, Angular, React. It is all JS, which means it integrates well with each other. One developer can work with the front-end and back-end, which also saves a lot of development time.
If you are interested in web or mobile application development, focus on companies that have the listed technologies in their stack. Of course, the technology itself can change a lot, but the main thing here is to put it in the hands of good professionals who know what they are doing.
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