Likelihood to Recommend I do not think I can recommend Appcelerator at this point due to the issues with Appcelerator studio, lack of good debugging support, lack of thorough documentation and forums and the additional cost overhead of licenses. The pros are just that it allows for cross-platform development. However,
Cordova does a much better job of it and excels at places where Appcelerator currently struggles
Read full review React is a JavaScript user interface construction library that works well for: Developing web apps with dynamic and complicated user interfaces. creating reusable UI elements that may be used in other applications. creating single-page applications with dynamic content updates that don't require a page reload. The Virtual DOM's effective updating mechanism allows it to handle large volumes of data updates. React, on the other hand, might be less suitable for: Websites that are simple, stagnant, and have no interaction. Other libraries or simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript may be a better fit in such circumstances. Web sockets may be a better choice for applications that need real-time updates, such as chat or gaming apps. When creating mobile apps, React Native is a better option. Server side rendering only, as React is designed to run on the client side. Read full review Pros Adds structure to your code through Alloy framework. Easy to integrate with iOS SDK and to build and run iOS apps. Read full review React is fantastic for building performant user interfaces. Our web app is snappy and great for our customers. React has the philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well which is the view layer of the application. This makes it incredibly intuitive and flexible for developers to use. React has lead the way in being able to write modular and structured code. It is a drastic improvement since the days of spaghetti jQuery code. React has an unmatched community. The amount of tools and libraries available is fantastic, and there plenty of solutions available online for common problems. Read full review Cons It is very hard to debug your code. Breakpoints never worked for us even with the latest Appcelerator Studio and we had to rely on log statements to debug. There is a need to purchase licenses from Appcelerator to run the code on a device or for creating iOS distribution builds. This is an additional cost when you have already paid for Apple developer program for precisely these things. If things are broken due to lack to support between Appcelerator and a new iOS version, you pretty much have to rely on a new version release from Appcelerator for the issue to be fixed. It is difficult to create enterprise distribution builds where the distribution certificate is owned by your organization's team and you only have a development certificate for the same. The forums on developer.appcelerator.com are seldom helpful. It is hard to find solutions for issues even on other forums like stack overflow. Documentation needs to be improved. Read full review Debugging React is challenging. Bugs in react code generate stack traces internal to React and it is often totally unclear how it relates to the code you actually wrote. Relating your React elements to corresponding DOM elements is difficult. The intentional separation of virtual and actual DOM also makes it difficult to map the elements to the structures in the DOM. This is partially ameliorated by the use of the React dev tool, which provides a DOM-like view of the React elements, but the tool still does not provide a direct correspondence with the DOM that is often necessary to figure out why something isn't right. Because JSX is React-specific and not a language feature, a special compilation process is necessary to convert JSX code to normal JS. Coming from a C++ background, compiling things doesn't bother me, but many JS developers are used to a less structured development. Read full review Usability React is just a bit of a different animal. I was avoiding it for the longest time. I thought for sure I would land on Vue or something else with a more approachable and familiar appearance. But after taking an online course in React, I started realize what people were raving about (and complaining about) and decided to implement it at our office for one of our products.
Read full review Support Rating Since it's open-source and very popular, the community support for React and related tools and libraries is excellent. There are a lot of people using the same tools, and so issues tend to get fixed quickly and "recipes" are easy to come by. And since it's backed by Facebook, they have a dedicated engineering team working on the progression of React.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Appcelerator makes you write a structured code whereas
Cordova just packages your code and you are free to structure it. Appcelerator bridges your javascript code with native code and that would make it run faster than javascript code in
Cordova apps. However, with recent mobile browsers, you would hardly notice any performance deterioration with
Cordova apps. Appcelerator struggles with issues related to its IDE, debugging, documentation and forums and additional costs.
Cordova makes it much more simpler to develop cross-platform apps with better developer support, debugging support, documentation and forums minus the additional costs.
Read full review While this is a widely contested debate with various blog posts and benchmarks all over the place, its really a personal choice to determine what works for the team. Coming from a Angular 1.x background, I decided to try a new framework when Angular 2.x was announced and at that time React is gaining popularity and Vue hasn't taken off yet. Compared to Angular 1.x and Vue (hybrid of React and Angular) that split the logic from the html templates, I loved the way React breaks code into components using the jsx syntax. In my mind, this allows for cleaner components and easier maintenance
Read full review Return on Investment We were able to build and deploy a mobile app with Appcelerator. However, the platform still has issues and does not cover our needs as much as some of its competitor like cordova does. Read full review Our web applications now run much faster because the whole page doesn't reload We spend less time developing UI components because a lot of them are readily available on NPM We don't have to optimize apps for multiple browsers since React natively supports it. Read full review ScreenShots