Last five year of the 21st century’s 2nd decade educated the world (or humans on Earth) how to delete an app. People are seeing the value of their apps. Useless apps are erased, removed, and crushed everyday. And thus, the war for that 44px parking lot keeps on going.
As a tiny little startup, one might find it wise not to spend too much time (more than a month?) on developing an app. Unless, one would like to listen live to Mr. Wonderful’s rants on why some company out there, who has the resources, connections, and powers, would not just walk-in and “crush you like the cockroach that you are?”
Luckily, the open-source world had opened a big door for the developer/entrepreuner. MEAN stack (stood for MongoDB, Express.js, Angular and Nodejs) had served those who need to hackup a website or webapp well. But what about mobile application?
Introducing, the PAIN stack!
PouchDB allows for easy implementation of client-side database. Website, apps and hybrid apps that rely on data can now be made functional offline while also be synced with remote database as the device came back online.
PouchDB can handle conflict as it is based off CouchDB, the very database famous for its replication ability.
From single g comes the MVC framework with its powerful bi-directional data binding. The best thing about angular is that the code base are very organized.
By the way, started thinking the angular way does not mean one won’t be able to think the other way. Switching between frameworks should be doable if one understood why 1 is not equal to 0 but true.
A framework built on top of Cordova. Ionic makes developing hybrid application simple. There are many templates to start from, and the standard way of styling things makes front-end decision straight-forward. Ionic is compatible with the majority of Cordova’s plugin.
Ionic also get a boost of plugin with ngCordova, a project aimed toward making Cordova plugin easier to use within Angular.
The central hub that makes up the rest of the story. Node carries the back-end that could serves and monitor data, or serve a RESTful service, or just about anything else.
Prototyping with the PAIN stack for the last thirty days was fun and productive. It allows new idea to be seen and touch, in just about two days. Next time, we will explore the stack that people are mumbling about, React.