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AltexSoft

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For six years, JavaScript has remained the most popular front-end programming language. Just look at the results of the latest — 71.5 percent of professional developers chose it as the most commonly used programming language. And no wonder it’s happening. This programming language’s structure makes it a perfect choice for building dynamic websites, applications, and games. StackOverflow survey Also, JavaScript is rather easy to use and learn, partly because of its syntax, partly because of its ecosystem. JavaScript has a large number of tools, frameworks, and libraries that make this programming language so popular and so wanted. And in this article, we will walk through the JavaScript ecosystem and look its most popular constituents. What is the JavaScript ecosystem? is a collection of software packages, libraries, and other resources that facilitate development as they integrate with each other. Those tools are created by different developers and providers — for example, the React library is powered by Facebook, while the Angular framework was created by Google, and Vue.js was designed by an independent developer. The JavaScript ecosystem A scheme of JavaScript ecosystem The JavaScript ecosystem tools facilitate developers’ work at every stage of an application building, starting with the first code lines and finishing with deployment. So, let’s start from the beginning and look at the tools for development first. Development tools This part of the JavaScript ecosystem relates to everything that is connected to the process of JavaScript software development. First, we’ll address . Tech stack is a concept, similar to framework: It is a combination of different tools (frameworks included) that allow a developer to create a whole product, including back- and front-end development and UI. Stacks are part of the ecosystem. One of the most widespread is MEAN stack. a full-stack development MEAN stack Source: Thinkwink , is a free, open-source JavaScript-centered toolset for building dynamic websites and web applications. It consists of the following components: MongoDB (a NoSQL database), Express.js (a web application framework), Angular or Angular.js (a front-end framework), and (a server platform). The main advantage of MEAN stack is that JavaScript runs on all levels of an application, and allows a developer to build the whole application from scratch with a single programming language. MEAN stack Node.js A developer’s life without those tools would be doomed to endless hours of work on a single application. Libraries and frameworks ease this routine. They consist of ready-made pieces of code that help to perform certain functions. Frameworks and libraries have their ecosystems too and allow for building the whole product within one. But what is the difference between a library and a framework? Basically, the principle of their functions is the same, but a framework is a wider concept. A allows a developer to complete certain tasks, while a allows for building a whole application at once. A library requires multiple integrations, while a framework already has its own ecosystem of tools and integrations. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of JavaScript libraries and frameworks for web and mobile development, but here we’ll look at the most popular examples. library framework Libraries is an open-source library for building dynamic user interfaces. It was created by Facebook in 2011. This framework is used for creating web-applications with multiple dynamic elements. React is based on JavaScript and , a PHP extension from Facebook that allows for creating reusable HTML elements for front-end development. React has React Native, a separate cross-platform framework for mobile development, which we will discuss a little bit later. But if you want to learn more about the and React Native, check out our article chock full of information on that topic. React JSX pros and cons of React is a library that focuses on handling HTML documents and has a simple API that allows users to handle events and create animation in browsers. Also, jQuery is used to manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) and has a plugin development function. It is a lightweight, cross-browser library with for graphic interface building, and for mobile framework . jQuery jQuery UI jQuery Mobile is a data-driven library, oriented on data visualization. It allows for manipulating data-based documents by binding arbitrary data to DOM and applying data-driven transformations to the document. The library supports large datasets and dynamic behaviors for interaction and animation. D3’s functional style allows for code reuse and operates with CSV and HTML. D3.js Front-end frameworks is a front-end framework powered by Google and is compatible with most of the common code editors. The Angular framework is used to build dynamic, single-page web applications (SPAs) and . When Angular was first released, its main benefit was its ability to turn HTML-based documents into dynamic content. Angular is among the most popular front-end frameworks, and you can learn more about it in our article on the . Angular progressive web-apps pros and cons of Angular development is another open-source JavaScript framework for single-page applications. It uses a component-based development model and allows adding components to a project. Vue.js is an example of a library that is more of a framework. The user must understand HTML and CSS to use it. It offers a number of templates and patterns that are used in development. The main advantage of Vue is the small size of documents and HTML-based syntax. Vue.js How Vue.js works Source: Vue.js is a framework for single-page web, mobile and desktop applications — Apple Music is built on it. Ember.js uses the (MVVM) pattern. Ember tools allow developers to create a development environment, and its command line interface provides tools for script automation. Ember.js tools include modules (Ember Data and Ember Inspector) that force the building process. Ember.js model-view-view-model Frameworks for mobile development is one of the best mobile development frameworks on JavaScript. This framework allows the engineer to develop native apps on Windows, macOS, or Linux. React Native supports Android 4.1+ and iOS 9.0+. It uses native APIs to render components on mobile. It doesn’t use HTML and CSS but has special APIs for CSS-based elements. React Native is a front-end framework that allows for building native and progressive web apps, as well as hybrid mobile apps in HTML5. It is compatible with Angular framework. Ionic is another JavaScript framework for web, desktop, iOS, or Android development. It has compact code and integrates with MEAN stack and the rest of JavaScript tools. Meteor sends data on the wire to the client server instead of HTML. Also, Meteor allows building UI. Meteor Back-end frameworks is the most popular back-end JavaScript framework. It’s a runtime environment that can be used with other front-end frameworks. Node.js reacts to events and allows the developers to create back-end applications, like social networks or blogs. Node.js is another back-end framework that integrates with Angular and React front-end frameworks and connects with Node.js. The best qualities of this framework are integration and build automation. Meteor is compliant with all parts of MEAN stack, and allows for building hybrid applications with , a framework for mobile development. This framework is a good choice for fast prototyping and building MVPs (minimum viable products). Meteor.js Cordova Package managers Aside from frameworks and libraries, this part of the JavaScript ecosystem is probably the most crucial, if we’re talking about development. Package managers replace hours of exhausting work: You can type just a couple of words in a command line instead of searching for the right plugins and libraries. A package manager finds necessary dependencies at once. Dependencies are plugins or libraries with reusable code that allow developers to optimize their code in the building process to create great applications. Package managers find them in repositories and install them to create a larger application stack. They also update these libraries and install new ones. is an open-source Node.js package manager. It’s used in a command line interface to manage plenty of plugins and packages of most JavaScript tools. It deals with components from jQuery, Bootstrap, React, Angular, and Ember. npm can install a broad spectrum of libraries for mobile, front-end, and back-end development. npm has the same principle of work as npm but deals with more components that contain pieces written in HTML and CSS, including fonts and even image files. Bower is used together with other tools to integrate with all sorts of setups and workflows. It can be used together with build automation tools like Grunt, Gulp, and Webstorm. But the disadvantage of Bower is that it only updates packages and installs dependencies. It can’t minify code, so it doesn’t clean source code from unnecessary elements. Bower is a scaffolder, a build tool and package manager all in one. It helps developers set up the environment and facilitates unit testing, minification, and some more processes that build tools perform. We’ll talk about build tools in detail in the next section. Yeoman Build automation tools Build tools, or task managers/task runners, as they are also called, allow developers to automate minification, compiling, packaging, unit testing, and bug fixing. is an open-source module bundler. It bundles web packages, dependencies, CSS files, and assets which allows a developer to create a dependency graph, package the assets, and send them to the browser. One more function of this tool is to analyze dependencies between modules and assets. Webpack requires Node.js framework to work with. Webpack How Webpack works Source: Webpack has a huge ecosystem of 6,453 plugins that help automate a significant number of tasks. These plugins are managed and installed via the npm package manager. It creates and configures tasks. Grunt is used by Adobe, jQuery, Twitter, Mozilla, Firefox Accounts, Opera, WordPress, and Microsoft. Grunt consists of several small modules that work on particular tasks and simplify the build process. Its approach lies in defining the tasks as separate files. This principle allows for the testing of separate units. Gulp offers over 300 plugins for code cleaning and formatting. Gulp Code editors Developers also need spell checkers to find possible typos. Code editors are the tools that handle this. All code editors must have at least three crucial functions: syntax highlight, auto-completion, and folding. In this section, we will also discuss an integrated development environment (IDE). They are different from regular code editors because of the number of features. An IDE allows a developer to set up the environment, edit code, test, debug, and perform . Some IDEs feature version control, code search, language support, and a visual programming module, as well as options for full-stack development and GUI construction. The most popular IDEs from the JavaScript ecosystem are WebStorm, Aptana, Zend Studio, Komodo IDE, Netbeans, and JavaScript Development Tools (JSDT). IDEs. code refactoring works in compliance with the main JavaScript frameworks for web development (Angular, React, Vue.js), mobile frameworks (React Native, Ionic, Cordova), and back-end frameworks (Node.js, Meteor). It automates unit testing, debugging, and integrates with several versions of control systems (Git, GitHub, and Mercurial). WebStorm is a multi-language IDE that allows for working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby. This IDE can be customized using scripts, and it also has a debugging feature, Git integration, and a built-in CLI terminal. The advantage of Aptana is that it can be used for deployment, which is one of the core features of this IDE. Aptana is an product, a global software development foundation, created by IBM. It’s a platform with three components that include JSDT Core (parser, compiler, DOM), JSDT UI (for graphic interface building), JSDT Debugging (debugging support), JSDT Web (support for integration with HTML- or JSP-based web applications). It integrates with such tools as JSON editor, Bower and npm package manager. JavaScript Development Tools (JSDT) Eclipse You may think that IDEs can fully replace all code editors. Maybe. But still, they are a good choice, because they are more lightweight and work faster. Code editors. is a leader in the field of code editors. Sublime Text is a cross-platform editor with a convenient visual interface, Package Control feature, split editing function, and a number of keyboard shortcuts that simplify the editing. The users must buy a license for continuous use, but the editor offers a free usage period. Sublime Text Sublime Text interface Source: Sublime Text is also a cross-platform code editor that works with JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Node.js. Also, Atom is compatible with PHP frameworks. Atom is a customizable tool with eight syntax and four UI themes pre-installed. The Atom interface allows developers to compare and edit the code across different files due to multiple panes. Atom has a portable version for all the platforms, so a user can employ different versions for different programming tasks. Unlike Sublime Text, Atom is an open-source code editor. Atom is a code editor that can be used with fourteen programming languages. It has a pre-built IntelliSense auto-completion module that also allows developers to edit TypeScript code. This editor’s Type Acquisition comes with the npm package manager and type declaration files. Visual Studio Code Testing and debugging tools Before deployment, pieces of code must go through testing to eliminate existing bugs that could appear in production. Automated testing and debugging tools serve to speed up the quality assurance process. These tools usually operate with particular JavaScript frameworks. Here we will describe just some of the from the JavaScript ecosystem. testing tools is a Facebook-powered testing tool, that works in accordance with React library, which makes it a part of the React ecosystem. However, it allows for testing applications that weren’t built with React. Jest is a behavior-driven development framework for JavaScript testing. It allows developers to perform both front-end and back-end testing. Jasmine is an out-of-the-box testing tool with easy syntax and pre-built tools. Jasmine is a part of the Angular ecosystem. It’s an end-to-end test framework that is built on native events and browser-specific drivers, which allows a tester to see the application as a user would see it. Protractor supports Jasmine and , another JavaScript testing framework. Protractor Mocha Protractor testing guide Source: Protractor Some testing tools for web-development allow for testing the code right in the browser, like , and . Both of them are browser extensions. Chrome Dev Tools operates with another application, Angular , which serves to debug and profile applications created in Angular. Chrome Dev Tools Redux Dev Tools Augury performs tests using the standard DOM API or libraries like jQuery. It allows for creating screenshots and works with other testing frameworks, like Jasmine and Mocha. Phantom.js is an open-source testing tool for browser and mobile testing. It’s a tool that integrates with any type of workflow, like Agile, , and . Selenium is a cross-platform tool that supports ten programming languages and seven browsers. You can read more about the in our article. Selenium DevOps continuous delivery pros and cons of Selenium Deployment tools Today most applications exist either on public cloud servers or use . Let’s take a look at the tools that developers use for different means of deployment. serverless architecture Cloud deployment tools is a cross-platform instrument that packages the code into microservices and helps to deploy and integrate it. Docker is a tool that can be used either as a server for continuous integration or a continuous delivery hub that comes with lots of additional plugins to tweak continuous delivery workflow. Jenkins is a tool for infrastructure as code management that runs both on cloud and hardware servers. Chef is a configuration management automation tool for cloud provisioning and application deployment. Ansible Serverless deployment tools (AWS) is a tool for serverless deployment of applications and services of any type. Aside from JavaScript, AWS supports C# and Python. As soon as a developer uploads it to the tool, it continuously scales the code. The advantage of this tool is that a user pays only for the running code. Amazon Web Services Lambda is a multi-language tool for an event-driven experience. This tool manages huge workflows and offers a high level of security. Microsoft Azure Functions has built-in continuous deployment and uses integrated monitoring tools. This tool also provides a mobile backend support and extends SaaS applications. Microsoft Azure Functions is an event-responsive FaaS that supports JavaScript and Python. It easily connects to third-party cloud services and charges users only for the running code. Google Cloud Functions also has building and testing features, using Node.js or Python runtime. Google Cloud Functions Final word If we were to cover all the tools from the JavaScript ecosystem, the list would be close to endless. Here we mentioned only the most used and outstanding elements. The number of these tools, frameworks, and libraries makes JS a good choice for almost any front-end development project. Being a popular programming language, JavaScript has a large community of followers and contributors who expand the ecosystem, creating new tools to facilitate the work of fellow developers. So, probably right now somebody is working on a new framework that will become a competitor to Node.js or Angular. Photo by Francisco Jesús Navarro Hernández on Unsplash Originally published at AltexSoft Tech Blog “ JavaScript Ecosystem: 38 Tools for Front- and Back-End Development ”

The JavaScript Ecosystem’s 38 Most Important Tools

Without knowing it, you’ve probably already used the apps made with Flutter. Whether you shopped on Alibaba, ran an ad campaign on Google Ads, or used a digital coupon, you’ve likely witnessed the results of Flutter’s still short history. The product has remained beta for a long time. Now, with its version, it finally stepped on the finish line before the initial 1.0 release. We understand the hesitation and excitement of the new, transformative technology for developers, so here’s our overview of the best and the worst of Flutter — and what you can do with it. Release Preview 2 The first question about Flutter you might have is “How is it different?” If you’re familiar with hybrid and cross-platform development, it’s valid to question how Flutter can be better than , , or Ionic, for that matter. What’s the point of switching? As we had no intention of promoting Flutter over other technologies, we decided to figure out why you should be excited about the product — and what to be wary of. Xamarin React Native What is Flutter exactly? Flutter is Google’s new open source technology for creating native Android and iOS apps with a single codebase. Unlike other popular solutions, Flutter is not a framework; it’s a complete SDK — software development kit — which already contains everything you will need to build cross-platform applications. This includes a rendering engine, ready-made widgets, testing and integration APIs, and command-line tools. Similar technologies such as Xamarin, React Native, Ionic, or NativeScript all try to achieve platform nativeness via different approaches. We’ve written a whole article comparing these . Now, let’s see what Flutter introduces to the game. cross-platform tools Flutter follows the , but with a twist. The main thing to know about reactive programming is that it updates UI contents automatically when you update the variables in the code. React Native also follows this principle, but it uses the JavaScript bridge to access OEM widgets. But since the app has to pass this bridge to access widgets each time, it causes performance issues. Flutter, however, omits this bridge altogether and communicates with the native platform using Dart. reactive development architecture is Flutter’s object-oriented language that uses Ahead-of-Time compilation techniques and compiles into native code without that additional bridge. This noticeably speeds up the app startup time. Besides, Flutter doesn’t have to call to OEM (original equipment manufacturer) widgets, because it uses its own. As seen on the image below, Flutter uses the OS as a canvas to build an interface on and moves services such as gestures, rendering, and animations into the framework itself, which gives developers complete control over the system. Dart Reactive frameworks vs Flutter Source: Wm Leler on Medium in Flutter also happens thanks to Dart. Dart Analyzer and Dart Observatory tools help find errors using specific commands. The process is explained in detail in . Another method includes using Flutter-supported IDEs and their specific debuggers. Since Flutter doesn’t use WebView it can’t be debugged directly in a browser like Ionic. React Native and NativeScript allow for testing via Chrome Developer Tools. However, considering that these products often prefer third-party solutions for debugging anyway, Flutter’s process shouldn’t appear very different. Debugging Flutter debug docs Since Flutter is a full-fledged SDK, it already offers an automated testing toolset, specifically, for three types of tests: unit test, widget test, and integration test. You can find Google’s tutorials for those tests . Flutter also supports the model via , a free tool that bridges Flutter with Travis, Jenkins, or Cirrus. at this link Continuous Delivery fastlane Pros of Flutter development What’s innovative, different, and simply better executed about Flutter? Let’s review the features that will make you consider abandoning React Native for a new tool. + Ready-made and custom widgets for fast UI coding Previously we mentioned that Flutter uses ready-made widgets. You could even say that Flutter widgets. One of the revolutionary things about the product is how it helps create a user interface utilizing these building blocks. Compare that to other approaches that use different objects (layouts, views, controllers), when Flutter has a consistent and unified object model. is Any object in Flutter is a widget, from a button to padding or a font. Widgets can be combined to create layouts, and you can choose to use widgets on any level of customization — from existing building blocks to the lowest level when you create your own widgets with the same tools the Flutter team did theirs. Widgets in Flutter are organized in trees, which is handy for rendering, but may result in an excessive complication of the whole structure. Large applications may require up to 10 layers of code to create a basic object, so you’ll have to plan the structure ahead. Flutter widget tree The fact that Flutter has its own widgets gives you one big advantage: Flutter already provides widgets that perfectly follow and Apple’s looks. The UI customization that usually takes the longest to finish in cross-platform development takes a minimum amount of time with Flutter. Material Design Cupertino + The mildest learning curve and a growing community Given that getting used to Dart is not a massive problem to you, learning the tool itself should be easy. The Flutter team notes that they’ve seen people with very limited programming knowledge prototyping and building apps, and also mentions that no mobile development experience is required to start with Flutter. Besides, Google is known for creating detailed and well-structured documentation, something that React Native struggles with. Apart from classic , you can watch from the Google team, and go through practical exercises on . And these are just the resources provided officially. You can find courses on Udemy and Udacity, join Facebook communities, and even a . docs video lessons Codelabs study group on Slack For such a young technology, Flutter is growing very fast. This graph shows the interest in Flutter on StackOverflow prior to the Release Preview 2 launch in comparison with other front-end frameworks. Despite still being in beta stage, the tool is production-ready which has only piqued the crowd’s interest. It’s available for commercial use and has already been successfully implemented in enterprises, medium-sized agencies, and startups. Number of StackOverflow question views Source: Google Developers blog + Dart — simple and effective language targeted at Java programmers is a modern object-oriented language that will remind you of or C++ with its syntax. It supports both making it easy to pick up for beginners. Above, we mentioned that Dart is responsible for some of the crucial things about Flutter. Let’s analyze what about Dart’s nature makes Flutter… well, Flutter. Dart Java strong and weak typing styles In development, engineers usually have to opt for the compilation their programming language provides. Programs compiled Ahead-of-Time usually run faster because they’ve been compiled before. However, in this case, the development itself slows a lot. Just-in-Time compilation results in faster development cycles, but, predictably, affects the app startup speed since the compiler does its analyzing before code execution. Flutter takes the best of both worlds by using JIT compilation during development and switching to AOT for app release. Both AOT and JIT compilation types. In Android development, the work is separated into layout and code. The layout should be written in XML as Views that are then referenced in the Java code. Dart takes care of that by keeping layout and code in one place. Since everything in Flutter is a widget, the layout is also created in Dart. No need for XML files. As you already know, the app on a user’s device will run smoothly because Dart compiles into native code directly, without the bridge. Better performance without a JavaScript bridge. While we’re talking about Dart benefits, it’s worth mentioning that the language isn’t limited to mobile development — it’s also used for building web apps, and by Google no less. It’s commonly used in combination with web frameworks, being Google’s own choice for some of its services. AngularDart + Hot reload function for instantaneous updates This tool is already engraved into Flutter’s architecture and doesn’t require any plugins to work. Hot reloading basically allows you to see updates in real time. Imagine you’ve encountered an error while running a program. In Flutter, you can fix it right away, continuing from where you left off, without restarting the whole thing. Going back to regular programming where deployment takes several minutes may be a struggle. Hot reload elevates programmers’ productivity, helps with quick iterations, and allows you to experiment without long delays. Xamarin and React Native have the equivalents of this feature too, but some reviews claim that it’s much faster in Flutter. We’ve yet to see benchmarks for proof of that. Changing app UI with Hot Reload Source: BuildFlutter + Portability Since Flutter is not just a framework but a complete SDK, it can run on virtually any device with a screen. Third-party ports have been created to build . They include embedding APIs, mouse and keyboard input functions, and different plugins. Some people even using Flutter. Considering the possibilities and Google’s fondness for IoT devices, it’s fair to expect that this functionality will become official in the future. Flutter apps for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux tried to build TV applications + Internationalization and accessibility Being an advocate for diversity and inclusivity, Google provides built-in opportunities to make your apps accessible to a wider range of users. Usually, when you want your app to run in different languages and be used in different regions, you need to prepare your code so it’s ready for localized content which is typically created later. This process is called internationalization. Flutter natively provides widgets based on the that simplifies this process. Today it supports 24 languages, but also currencies, units of measure, dates, layout options (for languages written from right to left), and more. Dart intl package Flutter also ensures and supports these three components: web accessibility Large fonts — adjusts font sizes to the ones a user specified in OS settings Screen readers — provides spoken feedback on UI elements Sufficient contrast — makes text easier to read While all this is automated, developers should also test their designs for different settings. For instance, they can use the largest font setting to see how it fits in a small mobile screen. Standard vs the largest possible font settings + High performance A lot of factors go into accessing an app’s performance: CPU usage, number of requests per second, average response time, number of frames per second, and more. The Flutter team promises a constant 60fps, which is the rate at which modern screens display a smooth, clear picture. Since any lag in such a frame rate will be immediately noticed by a human eye, developers try to maintain motion at this level. To access how well Flutter pulls through, see comparing Flutter, Xamarin, and React Native performance. Spoiler alert: Flutter came in first with 58fps and a 220-millisecond launch time. Xamarin launched in 345 ms with 53fps and React Native came second with 57fps and 229 ms. this research Just a few other practical comparisons have been made. , Flutter almost matched native app CPU usage, but used 50 percent more memory than React Native. Here Cons of Flutter development Whenever we review a young or less popular technology, we notice the same set of drawbacks diminishing the product’s success. Even though cross-platform development is a new programming practice, Flutter sometimes loses in the battle with its slightly older competitors. What are the drawbacks? – Lack of third-party libraries Third-party libraries and packages play a big part in automating software development for programmers and relieving the need to code everything from scratch. These libraries are mostly open source, easily available, and pre-tested — who wouldn’t want to try a tool that’s been used and tested in different environments before? For many older and more popular technologies, finding the needed package is not a big problem. As mobile developer Aawaz Gyawali on Medium: says Talking about React Native, oh boy it’s JS. We get 10+ npm modules for everything. Just type “…….. npm module” on Google and you will get more than 10 results. The main benefit of using RN is that the community of the developers is so big that, if you file an issue on GitHub, you will find someone who will create a module for you. Flutter, like any new technology, doesn’t share these numbers. Flutter’s gets better every day with, its list of tools is still growing. At least, Flutter takes care of your UI package needs with handy widgets, but any long-term development will probably require some waiting before the product abounds in contributed content. official resource of free packages – Dart, again You may have seen in our , that we mentioned Dart both in positive and negative lights. That’s because Dart is a great language by itself — its paradigm should be familiar to most programmers, it’s fast and object-oriented. But it often loses in comparison to other technologies, especially giants such as JavaScript, C#, or native and Java. Not many beginning developers will pick up Dart on their journey and finding new people for your mobile team can also be a challenge. This should be something to consider when you’re choosing a cross-platform approach. comparison of Flutter vs Xamarin Objective-C – Large file size Developers go to great lengths to minimize the size of an app. Users have limited storage on their phones, so it’s much more preferable to release an app that won’t make them delete it in favor of precious photos or a music library. To decrease the program size, programmers tend to avoid animations, bring the number of libraries and packages to a minimum, or compress images. Flutter has greatly frustrated developers when the release file size of the Hello world app reached 6.7MB. Even after dropping to 4.7MB, it than native Java (539KB) and Kotlin (550KB) apps — and that’s for the bare minimum app. Although, to be fair, its competitors share the same problem, and probably even more so — the release version in Xamarin will take almost and 7MB in React Native. remained much bigger 16MB – Issues with iOS Since Flutter is developed by Google, developers are rightfully worried about its implementation for iOS. There’s no doubt that building Android apps on Flutter is fast and enjoyable since Google is directly interested in fixing bugs in the shortest amount of time. But what about Apple devices? One of the biggest updates in Flutter’s Release Preview 2 included a pixel-perfect iOS look. The team the possibilities of Cupertino widgets by recreating iPhone settings on Flutter. However, until recently, design features weren’t up to date and followed iOS 10 features while iOS 11 had already been live for months. It’s unclear yet if updates will keep coming as fast as Android’s version when the product will finally leave the beta phase. illustrated How to get started with Flutter So, we’ve reviewed Flutter’s main features, dropped in some comparison with other products, and hopefully helped you form your own opinion about the technology. Now, how do you get started with Flutter? Windows users must have Windows 7 SP1 or later (64-bit) with and pre-installed. Mac OS developers need a 64-bit version with or newer installed while Linux users don’t have to comply with any special requirements. Check your system requirements. Windows PowerShell 5.0 Git for Windows Xcode 9.0 and follow the instructions. All operating systems support development both for iOS and Android, but you will also require a platform-specific editor. Dart comes pre-installed with Flutter. Download Flutter SDK. Choose your OS You can use any IDE with Flutter command lines, but Google recommends using their plugins for officially supported editors: , , and . Install an editor. Android Studio IntelliJ Visual Studio Also, you may find the following links useful: Material Design docs for Flutter Check out the curated list of resources Explore Flutter apps in a showcase Review the gallery of Flutter widgets Will Flutter replace React Native and Xamarin? Short answer: Not yet. Long answer: Should it? Considering the rate at which we’re improving our programming habits, it’s fair to expect a new Flutter to appear on the horizon in a few years. This doesn’t mean that any older technologies become obsolete, it just gives us more options and opens new possibilities. In business, however, the decision whether to use a new tool when there’s an old tried and tested one can cost a lot. How to know if you should take this step? We always recommend considering these three factors: If you have in-house developers, will they gladly learn Dart and embark on creating apps differently than they did before? If you want to hire an outsource team, is there one with Flutter experience? If you’re looking to create your own development expertise, is there enough Dart/Flutter talent on the market? Team. Does your team have time in between their project tasks to learn Dart/Flutter? How time-sensitive is your project? Time limit. How big a project do you have? Is it complex and long-term? Or is it an MVP that will bring minimum losses in case of failure? Scope. Photo by on Ian Parker Unsplash Originally published at AltexSoft Tech Blog “ The Good and the Bad of Flutter App Development ”

The Pros and Cons of Flutter App Development

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) — the look and feel of the application — is the first thing that catches a user’s eye. And, as a result, it’s what the app is judged by. Therefore, it’s vital to ensure proper GUI functionality and seamless interaction. This can be done by testing the GUI from a user’s perspective. GUI testing is performed to verify the features visible to a user, like menus, buttons, icons, text boxes, lists, dialog boxes, etc. It also makes sure that the appearance elements, such as fonts and images, comply with the design specifications. GUI testing takes place at the system testing level. To find out more about the levels of testing, visit our . software testing whitepaper Automating GUI testing can be very tricky and user behavior is complex. Consequently, it makes sense to use a ready-made GUI test automation tool. We have already elaborated on the pros and cons of the . In this article, we will focus on another popular automation framework, . Selenium test automation tool Ranorex Studio What is Ranorex? Introduced to the market in 2007 by Ranorex GmbH, an Austrian software development company, Ranorex Studio is a commercial Windows GUI test automation tool that provides testing for desktop, web, and mobile apps. Ranorex doesn’t use any specific scripting language, it is built on Microsoft’s .NET platform. The framework supports standard programming languages C# and VB.NET to edit recordings or create custom tests. Ranorex is based on the query language enabling easier and more efficient search of components in a web-based application. The Ranorex record and playback interface allows for automating UI testing by recording UI actions. Making testing way simpler with its codeless approach, Ranorex is definitely a go-to framework for a beginner. XPath Ranorex Studio supports a wide range of environments, specifications, and settings. Its includes: broad tech support Windows OS 7 through 10 and Windows Server 2008 through 2016 Windows desktop technologies, including .NET, ActiveX, Delphi, Java, Telerik, and Microsoft Office apps Mobile testing on Android and iOS Cross-browser testing on all major browsers Ranorex is a good solution for implementing automated testing in and environments which demand continuous testing and fast feedback to testing results. Ranorex offers a broad range of testing tools to integrate with: most popular continuous integration (CI) tools, test management (TM) tools, and task scheduling tools. continuous delivery DevOps Ranorex integration with the leading testing tools; Source: Ranorex Brochure Through integration Ranorex allows for built-in object mapping, automatic timeout handling, smart identification of dynamic web elements, testing on additional operating systems: Linux and macOS. Selenium WebDriver Main characteristics of Ranorex GUI test automation tool To get the full picture of Ranorex automation tool basics, check the following resources: Download full-featured 30-day Ranorex Studio trial Ranorex Studio User Guide Ranorex Forum Ranorex automation packages on GitHub General Use Ranorex Studio is one of the most comprehensive automation tools on the market as it provides solutions for multiple environments, devices, and applications allowing for automated testing of any desktop, web, or mobile software. That said, Ranorex is considered more suitable for web-based applications. Ranorex usage distribution among different platforms; Source: Ranorex Studio survey Popularity A data-driven research company, iDataLabs, whose data for Ranorex usage goes back almost three years, has identified 954 companies using Ranorex, which is about 1.2 percent of the market share in the Software Testing Tools category. Ranorex Market Share and Competitors in Software Testing Tools; Image source — iDataLabs The same research shows that most companies using Ranorex are in the Computer Software industry and located in the United States. Forty-nine percent of Ranorex customers are in the United States and 10 percent are in the United Kingdom; Image source — iDataLabs Compared to other popular test automation tools on G2 Crowd, a review platform, Ranorex outperforms in 4 out of 7 categories: ease of use, quality of support, ease of doing business with, and product direction. Ranorex Studio, TestComplete, Selenium IDE, and Apache JMeter compared at G2 Crowd To find out more about Ranorex in relation to other test automation frameworks, check our article comparing automated testing tools. Pros of using Ranorex + Multiplatform Application With Ranorex you can run automated tests for web and desktop applications as well as mobile apps, while competing products such as Selenium and Katalon Studio don’t support desktop testing, and Watir aims at web testing only. + Codeless test creation Ranorex Recorder with its drag-and-drop interface allows for conducting script-free tests applying keyword-driven testing. Once keywords are set by technically experienced team members, no programming background is needed to create and maintain automated tests with these keywords. Consequently, tests are easy to read and fast to design, since keywords can be reused throughout test cases. Ranorex provides two approaches to keyword-driven tests: Keyword-driven framework with automation modules Keyword-driven testing using . the action table While the former option can be followed without writing a single line of code, the latter one is more advanced as it requires basic programming skills. As we can see, Ranorex codeless testing allows non-programmers to apply test automation to their projects. Selenium, on the other hand, requires solid programming knowledge, which leaves non-technical testers behind. + Smooth learning curve Given its user-friendly UI on top of the code layer, Ranorex is considered one of the most approachable test automation tools on the market. In addition, Ranorex Help Center offers a variety of resources to ease the first steps of working with the framework: leads you through the process of creating, recording, and analyzing your automated software tests. Accompanied by detailed instructions, the app helps you get familiar with the Ranorex Studio user interface. Ranorex Demo Application trainings are in three languages — English, French, and German guides have step-by-step tutorials free test automation webinars are held regularly Ranorex Studio does a good job in facilitating the workflow with their tool, compared to other providers. In particular, Selenium courses and tutorials are supplied by third parties. + Built-in image comparison Automated software testing mostly relies on UI-elements recognition. Although many UI-elements may be identified by text, oftentimes there are cases where image-based automation is the way to go. For example, when a tested item changes its screen position within the GUI, text-based automation may still be tracking its original position, which will lead to incorrect results at the end. Image-based automation gets around such problems. Ranorex smart object identification technique is able to automatically detect any change in the UI. It includes the following : GUI recognition elements — a subset of XPath that serves to describe, search, identify, and find even dynamic UI-elements within an application RanoreXPath — a tool for specifying and editing tracked and identified UI-elements for RanoreXPath The path editor — a major functionality that makes Ranorex unique from other test automation tools. It explores and analyzes the application under test capturing necessary elements. Ranorex Spy While Ranorex offers image-based automation, Selenium, on the other hand, doesn’t provide such feature which requires you to either use another library or do it manually. + High-quality customer support According to , Ranorex customer service is professional, helpful, and quick to reply. The reviews show that 10 out of 48 users mention the timely support and comprehensive response provided by personnel through the Ranorex forum. user reviews However, some users claim that the support provides only standard answers and the only way to resolve complex issues is to allow the Ranorex support team to connect directly to the user’s machine. This may be forbidden by corporate data protection policies. + Effective in-team collaboration In many ways, automated test development needs to be treated as software development; therefore, the collaboration between team members should be coordinated accordingly. While most competitors rely on source control tools, Ranorex offers its own solutions for cross-functional teams. Based on an open XML format, Unified Functional Testing (UFT) is another QA automation tool designed with team collaboration in mind. However, it doesn’t have the workflow segmentation that allows Ranorex teams to consistently introduce specific skillsets into a project. The Ranorex test automation project comprises the following layers: Developers and technical testers script flexible automation elements on the Ranorex core automation framework; Meanwhile, non-technical testers are able to create codeless test cases or reuse existing core modules; Then, using the comprehensive XML-based test report, project owners and managers can review test results and check the project progress. This way, teams can effectively cooperate on test automation projects. Team collaboration within Ranorex test automation project; Source: Ranorex Brochure + Automatically generated reports Every test run in Ranorex Studio ends with an automatic report that provides details on test execution including visual screenshots for validation. This makes the workflow much easier than Selenium’s, where you have to build a separate reporting tool to plug into your test solutions. TestComplete also offers test reports, but they contain results only on current test runs. Ranorex reports are more comprehensive, as they provide Pie Charts with both current and previous test runs. Cons of using Ranorex – Paid license Ranorex is a licensed tool, which can be a considerable drawback taking into account many open-source competitive alternatives such as Selenium, Katalon Studio, and Watir. Ranorex is expensive, but it can be cost-effective in the long run given the number of features it supports out of the box. – Only a few supported languages While Ranorex provides flexibility in terms of platforms and browsers, it supports only two scripting languages: C# and VB.NET, unlike Selenium that allows for coding with ten popular programming languages. – No macOS support Although Ranorex now supports web testing of Mac apps integrating with Selenium WebDriver, the framework still can’t be launched on macOS. Ranorex is built on .NET, which doesn’t run on macOS unless using the cross-platform project. However, Mono isn’t supported by Ranorex. In addition, Ranorex needs access to certain parts of the OS that Mac does not allow. Locking down their systems, macOS hinders many Ranorex features that work on Windows systems. Mono – Small community While free tools such as Selenium and Watir are backed by a massive community, the Ranorex user base is much smaller. iDataLabs research shows that Selenium and Watir are used by and respectively, while only 954 companies are applying Ranorex. As a result, it might be difficult to find solutions to your problems and pieces of advice you’re seeking on the web. Users believe that the Ranorex team should work on organizing the community to share more plugins, problem-solving, etc. 24,725 1,376 companies – Unstable releases While being one of the most popular test automation providers, Ranorex frequently releases new versions. This, in turn, takes up time for updating the existing suites of automated tests. While new releases isn’t something to complain about, oftentimes it turns out that the new features are still unstable and contain bugs. That’s why it might be necessary to wait for the second update of a new version before making the change. Is Ranorex a good choice for your project? Although Ranorex might not be the first choice for a small development team due to many open-source alternatives, companies with large budgets can safely invest in the framework. That said, shows that the largest number of companies using Ranorex have more than one thousand workers employed. Organization size. Ranorex Customer Survey 2018 Companies using Ranorex arranged according to the number of personnel; Source: Ranorex Customer Survey 2018 Given the Ranorex script-free test automation, a non-programmer can make use of this framework. At the same time, Ranorex’s full IDE empowers automation experts to enhance their test suites and recordings. User groups. Ranorex user groups; Source: Ranorex Customer Survey 2018 A lot of well-known brands are automating their test process with Ranorex Studio. Use cases. As a healthcare technology supplier, implemented automated UI tests in their project Siemens Healthcare Computed Tomography. Ranorex’s modularization approach enabled sharing test automation steps and code modules globally among testing teams located in Germany and China. The storing of Ranorex test cases and results as .xml files simplified the implementation process. As a result, Ranorex helped cut down test execution time by more than 40 percent. Siemens , IP Management Software, chose the Ranorex automation tool for both its web and desktop support, as well as rapid test development. With Ranorex automated tests, the QA staff is now able to build multiple tests and complete them overnight. Unycom , a company for traffic, navigation and mapping products, applied Ranorex for mobile test automation of their Portable Navigation Device feature. After switching from the Calabash tool to Ranorex, TomTom benefitted from its friendly learning curve, interaction between multiple devices, and integration into HP tools for test case management. The company claims to have saved over 90 percent in time with Ranorex automated tests. TomTom Final word Ranorex is an effective GUI test automation tool that helps counteract challenges you may encounter while shifting towards . This framework accommodates different skillsets and ensures productive team collaboration while being integrable and innovative. agile software development That said, Ranorex has its drawbacks too, so it makes sense to define your priorities while choosing a test automation tool for your team. Whether your project has budget constraints or a lot of junior testers aboard, whether you develop primarily on macOS devices or look for strong image recognition features — all these and many other specifications will help you decide if Ranorex is the framework you should go for. This post is a part of our “The Good and the Bad” series. For more information about the pros and cons of the most popular technologies, see the other articles from the series: The Good and the Bad of Selenium Test Automation Tool The Good and the Bad of .NET Framework Programming The Good and the Bad of Android App Development The Good and the Bad of Java Programming Originally published at AltexSoft Tech Blog “ The Good and the Bad of Ranorex GUI Test Automation Tool ”

The Good and the Bad of Ranorex GUI Test Automation Tool

If only 100 people lived on Earth, 76 of them would be using Android and 20 — iOS (let’s ignore those 4 eccentric individuals with Windows and Blackberry smartphones). However, considering only US users, the paradigm shifts: Now, 65 people from that hundred are iOS fans. The popularity of an operating system in a given region is just one of many factors that go into deciding what platform to choose for your mobile app. Ideally, we, of course, want to create apps that give access to all mobile users regardless of their principles, brand loyalty, or even financial situation. But, when it comes to native development, you usually have to start with one. Join us for a review of Android mobile development and find out what benefits and challenges await you when choosing Google over Apple. Let’s begin. The Android’s History Do you remember the pre-smartphone era? We expect you don’t need a time machine to remember what mobility was like in 2006. Back then, Windows, Symbian, and Blackberry had been slowly supplying the mobile market with so-called — clunky, unattractive, enabled with a physical QWERTY keyboard and sometimes even a stylus. You might have had one of those. Early smartphones focused strictly on productivity. Consequently, there was one problem that plagued the minds of hardware and software providers: how to fit more into one this tiny device?. pocket personal computers They were doing quite well. We had Twitter and email, Internet browser, Microsoft Word, and many more handy features, but websites were not responsive, mobile Internet was slow, and people still used to sit down at their full-size PCs for a task that took longer than five minutes. Basically, the usability wasn’t considered at all — together with developers’ freedom. This was a restrictive world to operate in. HTC Dream running on Android 1.6, 2008 When the first Android device, (aka HTC Dream), entered the market, the world wasn’t even used to touch screens. But the first consumer Android phone already had Google services integration, built-in GPS, web-page zooming, and an early Android Market (with only 35 apps). Google and Android, Inc. creator Andy Rubin saw the future of mobile devices in software and the Internet — they planned to create and freely distribute services that would connect people to the web and enter the new generation of mobile devices. T-Mobile G1 Android development starter pack Native development for Android devices consists of this basic toolset: an SDK, IDEs, programming languages, libraries, and plugins. Let’s see what products you can use to form your own tech stack. An SDK is a bundle of tools that comprises an executable program. This includes documentation, debuggers, emulators, frameworks, libraries, profilers, and more. is already included in Android Studio, but if you want to use another IDE, you can download it separately at the bottom of the linked page. Software Development Kit. Android SDK . In theory, you can write Android apps in a regular text editor or command line, but the common approach is using an Integrated Development Environment. This tool integrates all SDK tools and helps to manage them more easily and in a more user-friendly manner. is the official Android IDE, but other options are also popular. is Studio’s predecessor that can use plugins to expand the code to more languages. is a paid but highly customizable option. Editors and IDEs Android Studio Eclipse IntelliJ IDEA Java and Kotlin are listed as the official languages for Android programming but there are alternatives. You can also use C and C++ using the — the tool for implementing parts of previously written app in native code. There are also third-party tools allowing you to create native Android apps using your favorite languages such as (Ruby) or (Python). Just remember that any unofficial solutions will lag behind in terms of updates. Programming languages. Android Native Development Kit Ruboto Kivy Software developers use libraries for all kinds of tasks. They are snippets of pre-written code that automate a coder’s job and eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel. The Android community is generous about such free solutions. The most popular of them include for serializing and deserializing Java objects to communicate with APIs, for API organization, and for easy communication between different app elements. To configure all these settings and organize the process of adding external libraries, developers use the tool called . Libraries. GSON Retrofit EventBus Gradle While libraries are used to automate project tasks, plugins are created for the augmentation of each software tool, an IDE in our case. We can’t possibly list them all, so check out this collection of and the curated list of on BestPlugins.com. Plugins. Android Studio plugins Eclipse plugins If you’re looking for more intricate solutions to improve your coding experience, visit this popular article for . top 20 tools for Android development Pros of Android development When talking about what Android does well, you can’t avoid the comparison with its partner in duopoly — Apple. Let’s analyze how Android is beneficial to developers and where it beats or ties with iOS. + Simple app acceptance process Apple App Store is known to be very selective about its published apps. While sharing similar guidelines, Google and Apple have a different approach towards quality assurance. App Store’s approval process can be tedious and demanding, but the Google review system favors almost everyone, as long as you don’t violate its main . Apple, however, evaluates apps more stringently — there are bugs, crashes, UI inconsistencies, and broken links the system will not accept your app. Same goes for rather subjective criteria — no lasting value — where your niche or content-weak app will be judged by the usefulness. content policies While meticulous reviews are not inherently bad, they mean that developers must first spend thousands of dollars with a risk of being denied by the platform. Google’s openness to new content allows you to release a or an early version of your app to gather feedback or give your Kickstarter audience a sneak peek. minimum viable product + Hardware independence Among the things required to develop Android apps, hardware will be your least concern. Android development is conducted on Java which makes the process cross-platform. Android Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, Fabric, and many more Android development tools can be used and downloaded on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Building iOS apps require using a Mac or a virtual machine. + Java and Kotlin as programming languages Android has two officially supported programming languages — Java and Kotlin. The first has been the beloved language for two decades already and named . is an object-oriented, cross-platform language that’s used everywhere from fintech startups to data analytics initiatives. Web, desktop, mobile, IoT products — all can be powered by Java, we’ve recently explored in a separate blog post. Java’s popularity will allow you to easily find skilled Android developers on the market or even within your tech team. 5th most popular technology in 2018 Java which pros and cons As for , it’s another highly-praised technology. It’s not exactly a language per se, but more like a new coding approach based on Java. It takes all the complexity and verbosity from Java and makes the whole app writing process faster and more enjoyable. Any Java developer can master Kotlin in no time, but it’s not necessary unless you have a little extra time to invest in migrating to a new process. Another good thing is that Jotlin and Kava (see what we did here?) are completely interoperable and can be freely used at the same time. Kotlin Introduction to Kotlin (Google I/O ’17) It makes sense to mention that Java and Kotlin are not the only — albeit official — options. Android Studio, for instance, also supports C and C++. Both of which are more complicated than Java but can be handy in certain cases, such as gaming apps. Besides, if we consider the , the language pool is even bigger — there’s C# in Xamarin, JavaScript in PhoneGap, and Dart in Flutter. cross-platform tools + Learning resources If you ever had to deal with Google documentation of any kind, you know what level we’re talking about. Apart from the massive amount of information on the web, Google offers its own for beginners, experienced engineers, and even special cases that require deeper knowledge. Materials are well-structured, enabled with graphics, animations, and explainer videos, along with some interactive exercises. Android dev training As of now, the training includes three streams: Android dev fundamentals, Kotlin boot camp, and native apps with Flutter. Besides, programmers can receive official . The one-time exam costs $149, takes 8 hours to finish, and tests a person’s practical knowledge based on self-study materials provided by Google. Google Developers Certification + Flutter Flutter is Google’s new free SDK that allows you to write native applications for Android and iOS using the single codebase. Although cross-platform tools have been popular on the market for some time, Google offers its own take on the growing demand for the write-once-run-anywhere programming style. Flutter iOS and Android Structure Although not without some drawbacks, as we proved in this , Flutter offers a few interesting features that make Android development easier and smoother. For instance, the tool has a built-in Material Design library that eliminates the need to write UI code when you simply want to achieve the standard Google look and feel. It’s also completely integrated with Android Studio and IntelliJ, which allows you to keep working with the tools you already know and love. And you can also use the existing Java code, so your native applications can be easily transported into the Flutter environment. Xamarin vs Flutter comparison While there are many cross-platform tools out there, Android developers should take a closer look at Flutter and consider what it may bring to the table. + Instant Apps The 2017 Android developer conference was rife with innovations. Besides Kotlin, Google introduced Instant Apps — native applications that can be launched directly from Google Play without downloading. Similar to , these are faster, easily available, and engaging applications that can give access to the limited functionality of the full service or give users a preview of the paid app. progressive web apps How Instant Apps appear to users Source: Android Developers What’s so good about Instant Apps? They’re the positive answer to “app fatigue” They increase engagement and don’t cost users anything They’re easily shareable and can be launched via a link They provide another entry point for users Technically, there are no limitations to Instant Apps. Just by tapping the Try Now button on the store page, users can sign up, make purchases, and access all content — only the publisher can set limitations. The building process is also easy — you write a regular app as you normally would and simply make a few configurations to adjust the user experience during publishing. + More than mobile app solutions If you’ve read our , you may remember that building virtual apps is not always an ordeal. Google, the crown prince of mobile VR, already has two headsets — the cheap Cardboard and the serious Daydream, and, in a truly ecosystem manner, you can develop apps for these devices using the same Android Studio and Android SDK. The only addition would be Google VR SDK, but considering tech stacks for other devices, this is certainly the most approachable one for the experienced Android programmer. intro to VR development The publishing platform for VR apps is also the same — you can upload the release-ready APK to Google Play or make it discoverable on the Daydream app. Daydream VR interface And Android development doesn’t stop there. The technology allows you to use the same toolset to build applications for a variety of products. This ecosystem includes: . This is the Android version that serves as an entertainment platform built into many TVs and streaming video devices. Apart from functioning as any other smart TV with integrated YouTube and Netflix, Android TV also has a built-in Google Assistant, curated video content, Google Play apps, voice search and more. By developing apps for big TV screens, you not only can provide another platform for your users to interact with your product but also extend the service’s functionality. Android TV . Wearable Android apps developed using the same Android SDK run on smartwatches from Asus, Huawei, LG, Samsung, Sony, . With knowledge in developing mobile Android apps, programmers can build wearable software and — dynamic screens that include animations and contextual information like smartphone widgets. Wear OS and more watch faces . This marriage of classic GPS navigators and Google services allows developers to access users’ cars via specific APIs — in a form of a user interface on the dash console. Currently, the service supports only audio and messaging apps but it’s expected that soon the platform will pave a way for more connectivity with access to a vehicle’s sensors and data. Android Auto . This platform allows engineers to create applications for low-power Internet-of-Things devices such as cameras or smart speakers. Such providers as JBL, Lenovo, and LG have developed their products using the Things system. Android Things . Any Android app can be optimized for use on Chromebooks, the first and only devices operating on Chrome OS. Although the overall logic and the interfaces are the same, some aspects such as resizable and free-form app windows need to be rewritten. You can also customize your apps to make sure the content looks organic on a bigger screen and also change the interface orientation. Chrome OS devices Cons of Android development You’ll soon see that the main challenges with Android development come down to a few of its characteristics that can also be considered advantages. Let’s see what they are. – Android users spending habits Numerous research will tell you that Apple users spend way more on their apps than Android enthusiasts. Statista that App Store takes more than 60 percent of all mobile spendings while Google Play lags behind with a little over 30 percent. claims The staggering difference between app downloads and consumer app spend Source: Statista Not only does it concern app downloads, but also in-app purchases. The reasons for that may be one or several of the following: The overpowering number of Google Play apps leads to a long list of alternatives for paid or freemium programs. Users simply can find more free apps similar to the paid ones Android and iOS share different demographics. Most Apple fans are located in North America, Australia, and Northern Europe, while Android is popular in lower-income countries During its long acceptance process, Apple weeds out the apps with the poor user experience. Therefore, more quality apps reach App Store top charts inducing users to pay up Many Android apps can be prone to bugs due to the big number of devices and active users of older operating systems on the market. Developers have to spend more time to thoroughly test apps on all models, which is often impossible. We will talk about it further. For a developer, all this means that you have to look for additional that aren’t based on traditional app purchases. app monetization methods And since we’re talking about competitors, Google Play is not the only store distributing Android apps. Amazon App Store allows you to share the same apps for Kindle Fire Tablet and Fire TV and the platform currently has about 400k available apps. Also, there’s the Samsung Galaxy Apps shop that offers special discounts for Galaxy smartphone owners. If you’re planning to cover the full mobile market, it makes sense to research distribution on these and other platforms. – Security issues Although Android’s open-source nature is a blessing for developers, it can also be a curse. While malware and hacks target millions of Android users almost weekly, Google quickly releases security patches. Unfortunately, most people fail to update their phones regularly. This means that app developers often have to take care of user data themselves by conducting complex encryption, including additional security features, or avoiding personal data input altogether. – OS adoption fragmentation Testing for Android is a big, fat con. The range of operating systems is large and one of the challenges related to app customization. According to Google’s own , most Android devices are still running on Lollipop, Marshmallow, and Nougat — operating systems from 2014, 2015, and 2016 respectively. 2018 report Most popular Android OS versions Another differentiation problem comes from various OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that create their own “skins” making devices running on the same Android version look so different. Not only does it present another update-staggering layer, but also leads to changes in functionality that may affect how your app works on all smartphones. Sony and Samsung are the biggest offenders known to create complications for programmers. – Device fragmentation The number of mobile manufacturers may be big but it’s still manageable compared to the number of devices these providers release — each with their own screen size, sensors, performance issues, and graphics drivers. In the official documentation for Material Design, a long list of Android (and iOS) devices with corresponding screen dimensions and resolutions. Spoiler: It’s much bigger than Apple’s line of 14 devices. Google shares Screen size fragmentation map created in 2015 Source: OpenSignal Product owners have two solutions in the device fragmentation issue: Either limiting the number of supported devices and systems to a manageable maximum or lowering the app quality when advanced sensors or other functionality isn’t supported by older devices. This, however, doesn’t make development and testing efforts easy. – Copyright problems Earlier we made a point that Google takes less time checking and accepting apps to Google Play, which means that you can release your MVP way easier compared to App Store. However, there’s another side to this advantage. First, Google doesn’t conduct thorough patent or copyright checks which means that you can unknowingly post a program that includes features or content already used in another product. Second, you can suffer from copyright infringement yourself when Google Play releases an app that repeats your unique solutions. Final word Often, the choice of technology, platform, or a device doesn’t even come down to development challenges. From the marketing point of view, you will first need to look at demographics, which don’t play in Android’s favor in the US. However, it makes no sense to release even half-ready apps for iOS, which is why Android is a perfect place to test your beta product version, an MVP, or even a high-fidelity prototype. If you prefer independence, openness, and more free possibilities, at least from the beginning, Android is also a way to go. And if all fails, consider the cross-platform approach. Originally published at AltexSoft Tech Blog “ The Good and the Bad of Android App Development ”

The Good and the Bad of Android App Development

This post is written in collaboration with Peerbits app development company For the last decade, the mobile industry has undergone tremendous growth, especially regarding application development. According to , there were more than 2 billion smartphone users in the world, and the number is estimated to increase to over 5 billion by the end of 2022. Of these smartphones, nearly 100 percent run on three popular platforms: Android from Google, iOS from Apple and Windows Mobile developed by Microsoft. For some time, mobile application developers depended on platform-specific tools to develop native apps, which could only run on a single platform. For instance, Kotlin and were mainly used to develop Android native mobile apps while iOS developers used , which you can read about in our comparison of these two languages. Statista Reports Java Objective-C and more recently Swift The Shortcomings of Native Mobile App Development Traditional mobile app development has been slow and more expensive since businesses have to develop a separate app for each platform and have different development teams with skills for each toolkit. Today, we have cross-platform mobile development tools to help companies reduce the development time, maintenance costs, and reach more users. simply means building mobile applications that can run on more than one platform. There are several cross-platform frameworks available to developers today including Intel XDK, Xamarin, Cordova, and Flutter among others. In this article, we focus on two — Xamarin and Flutter — by comparing the features, strengths, and drawbacks of each to help developers decide when to use one over the other. You may also check our comparison of the platforms. Cross-platform mobile development Xamarin, React Native, and Ionic Xamarin and Flutter Frameworks Overview Xamarin is arguably one of the leading open source cross-platform development technologies run by Microsoft. It uses the C# language to engineer mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile. Xamarin allows developers to access native Android and iOS APIs and provides shared C# codebase as well as app testing across devices via the . Xamarin was founded back in 2011 by the developers behind Mono which used CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) and Common Language Specification also known as . Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016 and later made Xamarin SDK an open source platform, which became an integral part of the Xamarin Visual Studio IDE. To leverage the full potential of Xamarin, developers also need some knowledge of iOS and Android besides C#. Xamarin Testing Cloud Microsoft .NET is also an open source and free cross-platform tool designed by Google to allow developers to create high-performance native mobile applications for Android and iOS. The framework uses the Google’s Dart programming language, and the light C++ engine. Similar to Xamarin, it provides a single codebase. The framework offers APIs and SDKs for 2D rendering, simulation, gestures, and painting as well as allowing the use of existing Swift, Objective C, and Java code. It comes with Machine Design Widgets, also a Google product. Flutter Flutter and Xamarin Comparison Although Flutter is relatively new in mobile development with its beta version launched in January 2018, the Flutter cross-platform development framework has triggered some discussions across the mobile developer community. Compared with Xamarin, different experts having contrasting opinions on the two frameworks. David Ramel in notes that the comparisons date back to 2015 when Google first unveiled Flutter, but they intensified in 2018, following its official release on MWC. Visual Studio Magazine Currently, Xamarin is more popular among developers as 7.2 percent of all survey respondents said they use Xamarin, and Microsoft claims to have 1.4 million Xamarin engineers, while Flutter hasn’t made it to the list at all. The Flutter community isn’t large enough yet. However, some engineers recognize Flutter as a budding alternative to Xamarin. Stack Overflow 2018 Below we’ll take a look at the characteristics and major features of the two frameworks. Though the insights in this article aren’t fully conclusive, they will provide you with some vantage point on the two frameworks. Xamarin vs Flutter comparison in a nutshell Portability Flutter is aimed at Android and iOS development, while Xamarin supports Android, iOS, and Windows Platforms (i.e. Windows 10 [UWP], Windows legacy [WPF] apps), as well as MacOS apps. The bigger ecosystem gives Xamarin an advantage over Flutter. The fact that Flutter applications aren’t portable to Windows mobile platform isn’t a large shortcoming as the claims though approximately 98.5 percent of smartphones today run on either Android or iOS. But Xamarin can be a one-fit-for-all when you want to develop apps for Windows mobile. Statista recent survey Flutter is not compatible with 32-bit OS devices. So, for instance, if you are planning to cover older phones like iPhone 5, Xamarin would be a better choice. Programming Languages Xamarin uses C# which is popular and widely used by developers. If you already have skills in C# and .NET, you can use Xamarin straight away. And you can reuse up to 96 percent of your C# code in Xamarin if you leverage Xamarin.Forms. Flutter uses Dart language which is relatively new and unpopular. However, if you have experience in OOP languages such as Java, JavaScript, and C++, learning Dart will not be a problem as it uses the same approach and paradigms. Community Support Xamarin has been around a bit longer and has a large community of supporters who are experienced and willing to share their knowledge with other developers. On Xamarin forums, developers, who are committed to helping each other, share their code and experience. The platform is also supported by Microsoft, which is a big plus when it comes to resolving common difficulties. Microsoft provides decent and up-to-date documentation for all its Xamarin- and .NET-related products. Although Flutter is supported by Google, it’s is relatively new and lacks the community support at the moment. The platform is also fairly young, with the beta version released months ago, which means that developers have yet to discover the framework’s main weaknesses and strengths. If you are planning for a long-term, complex project, you should go for Xamarin whose stability and issues are already known. However, with the Flutter community is growing, in a matter of a year it may become mature enough to help resolve most of the arising issues. Access to Native OS Dart code in Flutter is compiled into native using the AoT (Ahead of Time) compilation but still needs Dart VM (Virtual Machine). The reason behind the AoT compilation is that iOS platform does not support JIT or dynamic compilation. Flutter also allows you to build custom plugins which support platform-specific code. Flutter can access all platform services and APIs including storage and sensors through packages. You can also use Flutter Libraries to implement a platform channel used to call native functions from Dart. Flutter iOS and Android Structure In Xamarin, C# code is compiled into a machine code and then packed in .app. The mono code generator uses JIT compilation for the Xamarin.Android apps and AoT compilation for the iOS apps to compile the intermediary machine code (also known as managed code) into native platform code. Xamarin uses .NET APIs and platform-specific libraries through bindings to access native features. Xamarin iOS and Android architecture UI Design Although Xamarin’s use of native UI components is a good thing, it comes with a cost, as platforms are updated regularly, and this may take longer for the framework to adjust to the new versions. This also makes Xamarin only suitable for logic code sharing but not ideal for UI code reuse. On top of that, we’d recommend using native modules to handle heavy graphics such as games and animations. Flutter uses built-in widgets and doesn’t use native UI components. Widgets then are expected to be further customized with regard to the platform you’re building UI for. Currently, Flutter suggests a variety of layouts, foundation widgets, and platforms to create graphics and support 2D APIs, gestures, effects, animation, and other features. While Flutter UI features are still in development, they have the potential to evolve into a powerful UI-building environment. Additionally, Flutter comes with Material Design and Cupertino components. Developer Experience The hot reload feature in Flutter helps developers build UIs, experiment, and add different features as well as detect and fix bugs quickly with no loss of state on emulators. Developers can also access native features such as 3rd Party SDKs and Libraries and reuse existing native code (Swift, Objective C, Java, and Kotlin). One of the advantages of Xamarin is that it allows developers to test apps across the devices through the Microsoft Xamarin Cloud. However, you must pay a subscription fee to access the feature. Xamarin also provides the live reload feature, an equivalent of the hot reload in Flutter, which helps developers modify XAML and see the result “live” without compiling or deploying the app. One of the Xamarin problems is the integration with 3rd party Libraries, which seems to be better implemented in Flutter. Developer Skills Xamarin allows for sharing about 96 percent of C# code, but if you opt for fully native experience, you have to use some platform-specific code. So, Xamarin shines if developers have C# experience and also can deal with native development platforms such as Java, Kotlin, Swift, and Objective-C. To develop apps in Flutter you need to know Dart, which may take you time to learn, but if you are familiar with Java and C++, this shouldn’t be a problem. If you are a starter in mobile app development and have no Android or experience, you’ll have to learn Dart to get things done. iOS app development Binary and APK Size According to last year’s tests by , an engineer at Capital One, a basic app in Flutter had a binary size of 40.2 MB while the Xamarin equivalent had 25.1 MB. You can see more detailed here. Since then, Google made an effort of reducing the APK size for a basic Flutter app to 4.28 MB while that of Xamarin stayed around 7 MB. Korhan Bicarn results Memory, CPU, and GPU Utilization According to the same comparison, initializing the app’s address space and dynamic linking took 1.05s in Flutter. The app launched in approximately 220 ms and had a speed of 58 FPS. In Xamarin, the app’s address space initialization and dynamic linking took 3.2s. The app launched in approximately 345 ms with a speed of 53 FPS. You may also learn more about in our dedicated article. Xamarin performance Conclusion Although developers generally support the Flutter initiative, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Xamarin is rendered obsolete. It makes sense to consider Flutter if you are new to cross-platform mobile development as this platform is likely to become hot in the near future. However, is currently more mature in many ways, including community, toolset, and stability. Generally, for complex and long-term projects we would recommend sticking to Xamarin, especially if you have a team of C# and .NET developers and you’re into the Microsoft ecosystem. Xamarin Originally published at AltexSoft Tech Blog “ Flutter vs Xamarin Cross-Platform Mobile Development Compared ”

Flutter vs Xamarin Cross-Platform Mobile Development Compared

Software Engineer Qualification Levels: Junior, Middle, and Senior

Who doesn’t love a deep-background naming story? In the early 2000s, a company called Mercury Interactive ruled the test automation world with Astra Quick Test, its tool. It wasn’t the best product imaginable. For instance, you could only run tests on Windows computers, only a small number of browser versions were supported, and you had to use a single language to write scripts — VBScript. When software engineer Jason Huggins built a new, innovative test automation tool, he named his creation by referencing the chemical element and supplement recommended as an antidote for mercury poisoning — selenium. And this tool is what we’re going to review today. Introduction to Selenium Selenium is a suite of open source software testing automation tools that’s become the de facto product in the quality assurance world. With a list of several programming languages, all main operating systems and browsers supported, Selenium is currently used in production in such companies as Netflix, Google, HubSpot, Fitbit, and more. The whole suite provides a range of solutions for different testing problems and needs. Further in the article, we’ll talk about these tools, and the reasons Selenium stayed relevant after ten years since its creation. But for now, let’s examine what it is about Selenium that made it such a big deal. Jason Huggins’ 2004 creation was a JavaScript framework aimed at freeing its creator from repetitive manual testing. The product that was first predictably named JavaScriptTestRunner could execute tests directly in a browser, drive interactions on the page, and rerun them without manual input. The tool took off after Huggins realized its potential, made it open source and renamed it Selenium Remote Control. The innovative part of it was that no other tool before it allowed testers to talk to the browser in their programming language of choice. However, it soon became apparent that browsers applied security limitations on JavaScript, making it impossible to use the tool’s full capabilities. At that time Google was an avid Selenium user, but engineers struggled around the limitations. One of them, Simon Stewart, started to work on a product that would speak to browsers natively, which he called WebDriver. Selenium combined forces with WebDriver and changed the way we’ve been testing software for over a decade. To start your Selenium journey, check out the following mini starter pack: Download Selenium Selenium Documentation Selenium User Community on Google Groups Selenium GitHub project Join Selenium IRC chat channel Selenium Suite Infrastructure The first product in the Selenium lineup was Selenium Remote Control (now known as Selenium 1). Due to its aforementioned limitations and the following merge with WebDriver, it was soon deprecated and is no longer supported. The whole Selenium infrastructure can be visualized via the image below and we can highlight three main products that are still heavily supported and recognized by the community: Selenium WebDriver, Selenium IDE, and Selenium Grid. Let’s quickly describe each of them. Selenium Suite today Selenium WebDriver (Selenium 2) Most of the time, when people talk about Selenium, they mean Selenium WebDriver. The largest chunk of the product’s development is focused on this product. The way test automation in WebDriver works is often compared to taxi driving. There are three participants in taxi driving and test automation: customer/test engineer, car/browser, taxi driver/WebDriver. According to this analogy, a tester commands WebDriver to interact with the elements the same way a customer gives instructions to a taxi driver. Then, WebDriver gives the browser (the car) commands that sound something like this: Then the browser provides WebDriver information about values and statuses of web elements, which are later sent to the script. If you want to know more about quality assurance activities, see our comprehensive . When the button is clickable, click the button. software testing whitepaper In this article, we will mostly talk about the benefits and drawbacks of Selenium WebDriver. Selenium IDE This Firefox add-on is dismissed by half of the testers and celebrated by the other half. Not meant for production, it’s easy to learn and perfect for prototyping tasks. You don’t need programming skills to successfully operate in Selenium IDE as it basically records your actions in the browser and repeats them. However, numerous official and non-official plug-ins allow you to build a Frankenstein’s monster of IDE that can likely become a production-ready tool (we will talk about it in a bit). For companies that find Selenium WebDriver too high of an entry point, using IDE with some plugins on top may be a feasible solution. Selenium Grid Selenium Grid allows you to run parallel tests on multiple machines and browsers at the same time. The main function of this tool is to save time. If you have to run say 100 tests but you use Selenium Grid to set up four virtual or physical machines, it will take you about one-fourth of the time it would have taken if you ran these tests one by one on a single machine. Considering how scripts normally run slow on a browser, using performance-improving techniques such as parallel testing can help with the problem. You can also use it to test one application in different browsers in parallel, when one machine is running Firefox, the other — Chrome, and so on. You can create different configurations with Grid, combining different versions of browsers and operating systems. Needless to say that when used in large production environments, Grid is a huge time-saver. Pros of using Selenium Finally, it’s time to discuss how good old Selenium stays afloat with numerous terrific testing tools appearing on the market each year. + Free Selenium is not the only automation testing tool on the market, but it’s the only free one that can compete with paid products. As you may have seen in our Katalon Studio is the only viable alternative but it doesn’t provide that big of a language choice, doesn’t work on Linux, and simply doesn’t have a fanbase behind it. Selenium’s open source status makes a tool with a steep learning curve a low entry point for startups and independent developers. No surprise that even bigger companies don’t rush to switch to paid options and give away a few thousand dollars plus maintenance when Selenium still holds up. automated testing tools comparison, + Integrated with Agile, DevOps, Continuous Delivery workflow Selenium was following the Agile and DevOps narrative before these words were even put into practice. The whole nature of Selenium falls perfectly into the main principles behind Agile, , or . How exactly is this achieved? DevOps Continuous Delivery Since it’s portable across all platforms and often doesn’t require learning new languages, Selenium allows for an unmatched flexibility Selenium easily integrates with various development platforms such as Jenkins, Maven, TestNG, QMetry, SauceLabs, etc. Parallel testing with Selenium Grid allows developers to receive feedback much faster and work on the changes right away instead of waiting overnight for a test pass. + Supports mobile testing With Selenium, you can also test native, hybrid, or web mobile apps, though you’ll need additional software. There are two main options — and . They are both based on Selenium so that developers already versed in it can apply the same principles when testing mobile apps. Appium Selendroid Both tools are open source and have great community support. The main difference is that Appium supports iOS, Android, and Windows devices, while Selendroid focused exclusively on Android. Selendroid also bundles with Appium so that when you test for Android versions 2.3 through 4.3, the program will automatically switch to Selendroid. It may seem that using Appium is a more logical choice as it doesn’t limit you to one OS. However, it makes more sense to just use Selendroid if you’re planning to test Android exclusively. It also has a few nifty features such as “hot plugging” — you can plug in devices and unplug them without interrupting the tests, increasing the number of emulators or hardware devices that can be tested at the same time. There are two more niche tools you might want to know about as well: — a black-box testing framework for Android Robotium — a Selenium WebDriver API for iOS testing integrated with Selenium Grid ios-driver + Wide range of supported languages, platforms, and browsers The flexibility that Selenium provides is almost unmatched in the test automation world. First, we have ten supported languages, among which are Java, Ruby, C#, PHP, JavaScript, Perl, and R — all among today’s . It’s also the only mainstream tool that covers Linux testing. For a detailed and updated list of supported browser versions, refer to . most used programming languages this page Languages, platforms, and browsers supported by Selenium + Huge community iDataLabs, data-driven research company, provides into the software testing tools market. You can see that Selenium takes a staggering 30.59 percent market share of all software testing tools, with its closest competitor UFT taking just over 12 percent — amazing statistics. an interesting insight According to iDataLabs, more than 25k companies are using Selenium As one of the pioneers in modern automated testing, Selenium acquired a fanbase of developers in major players like Google and startups, too. The job listings for QA professionals include Selenium proficiency as one of the required skills. There are alternatives to Selenium, which we mentioned before, but their pricing ranges from a few thousand dollars to 10k. Having an exceptional free tool at hand keeps old testers loyal to Selenium, and new ones becoming fans. And they are becoming fans, judging by the demand for online courses. Udemy, Lynda.com, and Coursera provide several options for learning Selenium. Hundreds of step-by-step YouTube tutorials, with 25k followers, and 55k questions on StackOverflow signal a large, blossoming community, which delivers more Selenium talent to the market. a topic on Quora + Large library of plugins Selenium can be extended beyond its standard functionality with a wide range of plugins. Appium and Selendroid are two of them. On , you will see third-party plugins that are somewhat officially endorsed by Selenium, but you can find more unsupported ones on Github. Be sure to also google and you may find an extension for easy integration with your favorite programming product, such as Jenkins or Eclipse. this page “Selenium plugins <tool name>” These plugins exist not only for WebDriver but also for Grid and Selenium IDE. The latter ones are especially extensive, able to strengthen the functionally-weak tool and make it production-ready. Cons of using Selenium We never praise a software product without mentioning a few pain points that come with it. Selenium has some of those, too. – Steep learning curve One of today’s automated testing trends is codeless testing. This approach allows anyone without deep programming knowledge to perform tests. Some testing tools such as TestComplete, Ranorex, or Tricentis provide this option by building a user-friendly UI on top of the code layer and also enabling switching between two modes. Testers can still write scripts and receive detailed feedback but skip the coding part if needed. Selenium, however, doesn’t allow for codeless testing. You need a good grasp of one of the programming languages which narrows down the pool of people that can be engaged in the testing process. Many companies, especially startups, tend to employ their best coders to write product features and engage less skilled people in automated tests. This won’t work with Selenium. – No built-in image comparison In the QA process, there are difficulties in automating image verification. The simple and most effective way to decide whether an image is displayed correctly on the screen is to check manually. While it’s normal for most productions to use a , this is a big source of bugs since the task soon becomes repetitive and testers tend to check less often. combination of manual and automated testing One of the common solutions to this problem is . You have a mockup of your image that the program should compare to the one displayed during the test. TestComplete, Ranorex, Katalon Studio, along with some others already have this functionality included. To do this in Selenium, you need a third-party software. is a common choice. It’s an image-based recognition tool that integrates well with Selenium but it has limitations — it has to be running on the same virtual or physical screen and doesn’t recognize animations. image comparison Sikuli – No tech support Searching for help with Selenium is a double-edged sword. Above, we mentioned the abundance of tutorials, questions, answers, and links to chat rooms where you can ask the community for help. The bad side of this is that it’s the community that gives help, not the product creators. Finding a solution to your unconventional problem or help with custom requests is possible, but difficult. In case of need, you can contact consulting or service companies for commercial support. Selenium provides a short list of such companies on their . ecosystem page – No reporting capabilities Testers, developers, project managers — they all need access to test results, preferably visualized in the form of charts, tables, and supported by screenshots. What’s the point in writing scripts and performing tests when the final information can be lost or not communicated to the people who need it the most? The lack of automatically generated reports is one of the biggest challenges of Selenium. To capture test failures in Selenium, you must take a screenshot at the moment of failure. This is far from the readable format that the team needs to quickly diagnose the problem. While different vendors offer reporting functionality with data-driven insights and team-working tools integration, Selenium has to rely on third-party solutions. The following are the most popular ones: creates two types of reports upon test execution: detailed and summary. The summary provides simple passed/failed data; while detailed reports have logs, errors, test groups, etc. TestNG uses HTML to generate simple reports in Selenium with indicators “failed” and “succeeded.” JUnit is the most complex option: It creates test summaries, includes screenshots, generates pie charts, and so on. Extent Library creates beautiful reports with graphs, a timeline, and categorized test results — all on a handy dashboard. Allure Final word What would happen if Selenium suddenly announced it’s going the paid route? It’s hard to critique something when it’s provided to you completely free, but how painful would the pitfalls be if we suddenly had to pay for them? Selenium is not perfect but it’s just good enough for testers to put forth a greater effort and ignore the codeless trend. It hits that sweet spot when you’re prepared to spend a few hours looking for a solution online instead of getting the help you paid for. And it still has a few aces up its sleeve that fit right in with today’s engineering narrative: faster delivery, coming in small sections to handle easily, receiving immediate feedback. Selenium is a universal use case. It doesn’t overshadow all of the other test automation tools, especially if you have the budget for them. But its monopolizing nature makes you think twice before you look the other way. Perhaps, it’s not that bad. This post is a part of our “The Good and the Bad” series. For more information about the pros and cons of the most popular technologies, see the other articles from the series: The Good and The Bad of Xamarin Mobile Development The Good and the Bad of JavaScript Full Stack Development The Good and the Bad of Node.js Web App Development The Good and the Bad of ReactJS and React Native The Good and the Bad of Swift Programming Language The Good and the Bad of .NET Framework Programming The Good and the Bad of Angular Development The Good and the Bad of Java Programming Originally published at AltexSoft Tech Blog “ The Good and the Bad of Selenium Test Automation Tool ”

The Good and the Bad of Selenium Test Automation Tool

This is a guest article by Stanislav Ustimenko from CodeLobster. Since programmers spend a lot of time in their editors and IDEs, they are extremely serious about their choice of software. At a minimum, the programming environment should provide syntax checking and code correction, autocompletion and auto-addition — all known as “code intelligence.” You should consider the whole aggregate of technologies used — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, as well as the distributed nature of any WEB-application. PHP is a server programming language and, in most cases, scripts are written on one computer and run on the other, in the environment of the hosting operating system. The server part of any site may also include a huge number of SQL queries and intensive interactions with databases. If you decide to go beyond hobby-level projects to program professionally, it is critical for your program to support the FTP protocol, understand the syntax of SQL, and provide an interface for connecting to databases, in addition to advanced editing capabilities. Let’s examine how popular code editors and IDEs implement such important capabilities for PHP developer functions. Sublime Text presents an excellent example of balance between functionality and speed, along with an economical use of system resources. The latest version works efficiently and quickly, and a reduced amount of RAM used too. It works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. Additionally, there is a portable version for Windows. Sublime Text There is a flexible system of settings for both the interface and all kinds of functions using configuration files in JSON-format. The editor provides a set of APIs, so it can be programmed and extended using Python. There is even a built-in Python interpreter. Immediately after starting the program, go to the main menu . Package Control is a tool that allows you to manage other packages. Tools -> Install Package Control To expand the functionality, you have to install the packages. Start the Package Control, go to the main menu and enter the command from the keyboard. Preferences -> Package Control Install Package Working with the code If you open the folder with code, the editor will consider it a project. To check the syntax of PHP when saving files, install the PHP Syntax Checker extension. Then if there are errors, a warning dialog will appear. To highlight syntax errors on the fly, install the plug-ins SublimeLinter and SublimeLinter-php. For them to work properly, also install PHP 7.0. Now the editor will check the file and highlight the problem line of code. You can also get information about the error in the tooltip and on the bottom panel of the editor To get a list of links including the file with the function declaration and its use cases, simply hover the pointer on the function name. You can also instantly go to the function declaration or class definition by right clicking on it and selecting from the context menu. Go to Definition For those who work with frameworks and OOP, there is PHPCompanion, a special plugin that immediately adds a whole set of useful tools to the program. This module helps to work with namespaces and import classes. Debugging capability Use the plugin Xdebug Client to perform full debugging with minimal settings. To work with this package, enable the Xdebug PHP extension on your server. SQL and databases There are two extensions for this — SQLExec and SQLTools. They share similar functionality and settings. You can also connect to PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL, SQLite, Vertica, and Firebird. You must also install a binary distribution of DB, with which you plan to interact. Working on FTP You’ll find it convenient to work with a remote file system using FTP, FTPS, and SFTP with the SFTP extension. It provides a very simple interface for viewing the folder structure and manipulating files. Viewing files structure on Sublime Text Files are automatically uploaded to the server after saving, and there’s support for the output of information about the process of connection, downloaded, and uploaded files. All settings and actions within this plugin can be found in the menu . File -> SFTP/FTP Support for frameworks There is only basic support for MVC frameworks, mainly represented by various snippet collections and quick access to online documentation. Atom is the editor the PHP community would like to know more about. Many developers who have experienced it were pleased with it — the editor is very flexibly configured, but the default settings also work well. Atom Atom is an open source editor, created using WEB-technologies. Extensions for Atom are created using simple JavaScript and a . Node.js framework It is a cross-platform with versions for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. There is also a portable version for Windows systems. The portable version allows you not only to use the program without installation, but also to use several versions of the editor for various programming tasks simultaneously. Working with the code Atom allows you to open both individual files and entire directories as a project. Initially, there is basic support for PHP syntax. This editor easily turns into a PHP IDE. To do this, install the Atom-ide-ui add-on and the specific plug-in IDE-PHP. In addition, PHP 7.0 runtime must be installed. After applying these actions, Atom gets a more functional appearance These add-ons provide error detection, warnings display, autocompletion and auto-addition, and improved code navigation. Debugging capability You can add this with extensions. For example, support for Xdebug can be enabled by installing the modules PHP-debug and Atom-debug-ui. SQL and databases The Data-Atom package is used to enable the support of MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server. It allows you to create connections, then view the structure of the database and tables, and perform any queries. SQL support in Atom You will find settings and appropriate functions in the main menu . To properly install this plugin, Git should also be installed. Packages -> Data Atom Working on FTP An ability to connect to a remote computer without extraneous FTP clients is achieved with the FTP-Remote-Edit package. First, create a connection. Then you can view the contents of the remote directory, and the files will be automatically uploaded to the server after saving. Support for frameworks As you know, editors are not the best choice when you need to work with a lot of frameworks. However, their support can be configured by installing one or more additional packages. Virtually, editor has extensions for various PHP frameworks, but for this software, JavaScript libraries support is better implemented. Rapid PHP is a PHP editor with a good reputation and advanced functionality, so you could call it a lightweight IDE. Rapid PHP It includes the entire set of components for writing scripts in PHP and JavaScript as well as for using HTML and CSS. There are several useful features to make it easier for novice programmers to start coding, for example, the familiar user interface, the lack of unnecessary controls and the built-in PHP interpreter. Immediately after launching the program, you are offered a minimal user interface. Then, during the operation, you can hide and show all open panels by pressing the F4 key. There’s also an upgraded editor with PHP syntax checking, fragments insertion, highlighting search entries, and high performance when opening large files. There is a convenient function, Goto Anything, that allows you to quickly start a search by pressing the Ctrl + G keys to go to any section of the code or file in the project. Many useful features can be added to the editor by installing additional plug-ins. To see a list of available extensions, select the option from the main menu. Plugins -> Manage Plugins Working with the code Rapid PHP has ­advanced features for editing PHP files, including integrated documentation and tooltips on functions. For example, to get a hint on the parameters of a function, just enter its name and press Ctrl + Shift + Space Debugging capability The PHP debugger works in conjunction with Xdebug and provides all the standard functions for finding errors in scripts. You can track the state of the user-defined and global variables, view call stack, execute the file step by step or by using checkpoints. SQL and databases Rapid PHP has a built-in SQL Database Explorer with an ability to connect to MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird and SQLite. It allows you to execute queries and view the structure of the database. Working on FTP A convenient file browser and the built-in FTP client allow you to work with remote files using both simple FTP and secure connection using TLS, SSL and SSH. Support for frameworks Smarty is supported by default. To work with the syntax of other libraries, go to the main menu . Options -> Frameworks The following components are available: CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Nette, Prado, Symfony, Yii and Zend Framework. From content management systems only, WordPress is supported CodeLobster is created by our team and it’s a well-known IDE with support for all WEB-technologies. It’s written in C++. And consequently it has a responsive interface and notable fast editing — there are no delays while typing code. CodeLobster Here, you will find all the tools that PHP programmers might need. Project work is provided by a simple navigation through code and files, understanding of the structure of the project, instant search, and identification of syntactic errors. Working with the code It’s a multilingual editor that understands files with mixed code and provides appropriate highlighting in different colors. When working with large sources, use local bookmarks and the ability to collapse blocks of code. Most actions in CodeLobster are duplicated by keyboard shortcuts. For example, press Alt + C and you can instantly comment on the current line or selection. Then press Alt + Ctrl + U to uncomment the fragment. There’s an integrated help system — you can see tooltips when hovering over an item of interest, an autocomplete for all PHP functions, and additional libraries. Dynamic help works depending on the context. The IDE automatically selects a list of links to relevant documentation for the current element in the code. To use this function, go to the Dynamic Help tab on the right panel of the editor To view online help on the element on which the cursor is positioned, press the F1 key to open the official documentation in the browser. Debugging capability The Xdebug extension is used during the search and elimination of errors in PHP scripts. However, you should first enable and configure it on the server. SQL and databases The system of interaction with databases contains a built-in SQL-client; you can create several connections and link them to projects in the settings. Syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and auto-substitution are implemented according to the structure of the current database. Created queries are saved in files with the sql extension, so that you can later edit them and view the results. Working on FTP CodeLobster is enabled with an FTP connection manager, which can be flexibly configured for any type of server and copes well with downloading and uploading a large number of files. The files are transmitted in binary or ASCII modes; you can work with the server over an encrypted connection using SSL/TLS or SSH. Support for frameworks CodeLobster comes with a whole set of plug-ins for working with the most popular PHP libraries and CMS, among them such frameworks as CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Phalcon, Smarty, Symfony, Twig, Yii. You can download, install, and add to the project any of the listed frameworks directly from the program environment. You can start creating your online store on the basis of Magento, the famous eCommerce platform — just select the type of project you need and configure access to the database The latest version of the CMS will be downloaded and installed in automatic mode, without even using the Web-interface. The same functionality is provided for Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. Using all the capabilities of these systems will greatly accelerate the process of developing and launching Internet projects of any scale. PHPStorm is a popular IDE with a huge number of different functions and features. It performs an in-depth analysis of the project and understands its structure and dependencies very well. PHPStorm It’s developed in based on IntelliJ IDEA — an open source platform, meaning that PHPStorm inherited all the best from its parent platform. Java programming language Every detail can be customized. There are numerous hot keys, various highlight styles, and themes for the user interface. Working with the code If the folder in which you placed a new project already contains files, the project will be created based on the existing sources. To use auto-completion, start typing the name of the method or class and press Ctrl + Space — all available options will appear as a list. After that you can get a hint about the parameters To do that, press Ctrl + Shift + Space. For instant reference information on any function, just place the cursor on its name and press Ctrl + Q. Click on the link in the window that appears to go to documentation on the official website for more detailed analysis Debugging capability There is a full Visual Debugger that’s recommended for use in conjunction with the Xdebug extension, but integration with Zend Debugger is also possible. SQL and databases To display SQL-tools and view the list of connections, select from the main menu. You can connect to many different databases: DB2, Derby, HSQLDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, and Sybase. View -> Tool Windows -> Database After all the necessary settings are made, the connection is established and these options become available: overview of the database structure, editing of tables, deletion and addition of fields and new records, execution of various SQL queries, and many others. Working on FTP Download and upload files via FTP using any type of connection — FTP, SFTP, or FTPS. To use this function, go to the main menu and select the option . File -> New Project from Existing Files Web server is on remote host files are accessible via FTP/SFTP/FTPS Next, name the project, set up an FTP connection, and download remote files for editing. Support for frameworks Template engines Blade and Smarty, MVC frameworks in particular such as Laravel, CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, Yii are supported. The ability to create projects based on content management systems, such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, are well implemented. The IDE supports WordPress Actions and Filters. It offers an autocomplete and dynamic hints on existing parameters. The IDE is able to index the code of any PHP library and then use this data to display documentation or function hints Let’s summarize Much work was done by the developers when creating the tools discussed in this article. As a rule, IDEs come with a lot of functionality that can’t just be selected and disabled. But it is thanks to such advanced functions that PHP programmers can get the most out of a programming environment while creating their applications and websites. But why should an IDE lose performance with expanding functionality? At what stage of its life cycle may the development environment become “slow-moving” and inconvenience its users? We, the team, tried to find an effective solution to this problem. So, we chose the low-level C++ language and the Qt library to preserve all the advantages of the native application. CodeLobster As a result, the program is experiencing robust growth and we constantly add support for the new and most up-to-date WEB-frameworks. Despite the complexity of this approach and all the difficulties in maintenance of low-level code, the user experience has been greatly improved. Because a completely cross-platform version has recently been released, you can now independently test this application on any OS. But any editor is still a construction set. After installation, we get only the most necessary, universal capabilities. It will be necessary to install additional extensions to turn any of the editors into a full-featured IDE. But they start almost instantly, work quickly, and are not demanding on computer resources. Which program is the best? Everyone should decide that for themselves individually. To use a simple and fast editor or to take a full-fledged IDE — that depends on the developer her/himself, on what solutions they are seeking at the moment, and under what conditions they’re working. Stanislav is a project manager in Codelobster Software with 10-year experience in PHP coding. Want to write an article for our blog? Read our requirements and guidelines to become a contributor . Originally published at AltexSoft Tech Blog “ Comparing Best Code Editors for PHP Developers ”

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