Axway Appcelerator (discontinued) vs React

• Adds structure to your code through Alloy framework.
• Easy to integrate with iOS SDK and to build and run iOS apps.

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• React is designed around the notion of generated html as opposed to templated html. This provides more flexibility in building elements on a page, and allows developers to create html that is programmatically configured based on runtime considerations.
• React uses JSX, which is HTML templating integrated into javascript code. This simplifies the generation of complex structures, especially those that vary based on runtime and interactive data.
• React is more efficient because it generates a virtual DOM rather than directly building in in the actual DOM. By building 'offline' in this manner, the DOM generation is faster. After building, it can be installed in one operation.
• React only builds those portions of the display that have changed, making display updates more efficient.

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• 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.

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• React could get very frustrating unless you start thinking in React. React enforces a top down hierarchy of data flow and offers no way for the data to communicate backwards. This is a big shift in mindset coming from Angular 1.x. This constraint is really a big factor that determines how to organize your code and how you might want to write your own Components.
• Because of the self imposed top down hierarchy, you end up having a heavy parents with dumb children. Because parents would need to the bulk of the work, they usually manage the state, while passing callbacks to the child components. If not properly designed, this could lead to the callback hell, where you could have callbacks passing through like multiple children.
• As with any library, you will have to iterate through multiple designs to come up with a ways to avoid "heavy parent components" in React. One obvious solution is using some open source tools like Redux, but we opted for a variation of it to suit our needs.

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• 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.

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• React allows a modular design, which is fabulous for A/B testing (showing a different module to each user). Some of these experiments had an improvement as big as to pay for the whole team that coded it. So far we know the ROI has been positive, but I can't provide a number.

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