
Pepperoni – A framework to build apps faster, powered by React Native - kimmobru
http://getpepperoni.com
======
alttab
It'd be great if they showed a screenshot from a hello world app or something.
It's really hard to actually know what they mean when they use words I think I
understand.

maybe the code example or hello world is on another page, but if cross
platform rapid app development is the core value prop, they need to put it
front and center based on their audience - app developers.

all the landing page gives me now are fancy framework words with no APIs and a
picture of a pizza.

~~~
kimmobru
I forwarded this to the main contributors, thanks for the good feedback.
Pepperoni is more of a starter kit to kickstart your React Native development
as fast as possible. You get the redux architecture and other solid pieces but
there's no internal framework API. I hope that explained the core idea.

~~~
rco8786
That idea is explained well, but I agree with OP in that a working example
would do wonders.

Is this a boilerplate repo that I should clone and build off of? Is this a
project generator like rake? Is this a library I should npm install to depend
on?

How do I actually use it?

~~~
Zyst
I agree with this. The page says it's a framework, but I feel like it's
describing a kickstarter/generator. That said, I will bookmark Pepperoni and
give it a go during the weekend, it looks interesting.

~~~
jevakallio
Thanks for your interest! It's definitely more of a project boilerplate. We
have big ideas for the future, but starting out small.

Thanks for the notes on the mixed messaging, we'll tweak the website to be
more informative.

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iamleppert
Has anyone else noticed the trend at over-marketed "frameworks" like this with
fancy graphics, lots of use of logos, etc?

Maybe I'm just getting old by anymore I have a feeling of "ugh" set in when
seeing that page.

~~~
morley
So a designer and developer were passionate enough about a framework to make a
website about it. What about that bothers you? If you like the framework, and
a professional website result in more people using it, then you win out. If
you don't, then don't use it. Life goes on.

~~~
tdkl
The fact that the site doesn't tell anything about the framework, nor it
showcases it. It's megabytes and scrolling for nothing except a actual
paragraph of content. [1]

[1]
[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

~~~
estreeper
447KB transferred.

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padseeker
Someone should just track the number of frameworks that get publicized on
hacker news, and how quickly they die. I like this idea, but then again I've
liked a lot of them.

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hypercluster
I'm justing starting out as an iOS developer. I wonder how the growing
popularity around React Native will impact native development. I mean Futurice
for example doesn't have a shortage of good iOS developers looking at their
best practice guides and all.

~~~
distances
That's the life of a developer, I'd say. Frameworks, languages and platforms
come and go, so planning for the far-away future doesn't make much sense. It's
much more important to grasp the core concepts, learn quickly, and keep the
interest in continuous skill set development.

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andybak
How back-end agnostic is it? The most likely case for me is that a back-end
would already exists (or I'd be building one with Django Rest Framework)

~~~
jevakallio
Pepperoni App Kit is going be fully backend agnostic - we haven't implemented
all the bits yet, but the only assumption we will be making is that your data
is JSON served over HTTP, using JWT authentication - and the authentication
bit can be easily changed.

We are also going to implement a Pepperoni Backend Kit, based on node.js. The
App Kit will not require you to use that backend, though.

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nathan_f77
This looks fantastic, just what I've been looking for. Curious to know why
there doesn't seem to be any mention of fastlane [1]? I think every
boilerplate mobile project should definitely include an example fastlane
setup.

[1]: [https://fastlane.tools/](https://fastlane.tools/)

~~~
jevakallio
We looked at Fastlane and thought it looks very interesting, but because we
didn't have personal experience with it, we decided to go with what we know:
Bitrise for the CI, CodePush for the app live updates.

We would love see contributions that add Fastlane configurations though. If
you're interested in helping out, please open a GitHub issue and let's discuss
what should be done.

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fiatjaf
What about Cycle Native?

~~~
jevakallio
I'm one of the authors of Pepperoni, as well as contributor to Cycle Native. I
would love to see Cycle.js become a first class citizen of the React Native
ecosystem.

At CycleConf last month we hacked around improving the Cycle/RN interop and
solving a few of the big problems that prevented using Cycle Native for real
apps, and ended up rewriting most of the Cycle Native internals. Our work is
not yet fully merged to the official repo, needs a bit of cleanup before we
can do that.

The work in progress is here: [https://github.com/jevakallio/cycle-react-
native](https://github.com/jevakallio/cycle-react-native)

~~~
jevakallio
Correction to the previous: The CycleConf changes are now part of the official
cycle-react-native repo: [https://github.com/cyclejs/cycle-react-
native](https://github.com/cyclejs/cycle-react-native)

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ausjke
whenever I had to compare Angularjs vs React the one key difference is that
the former has ionic and the latter has React Native, to get performance non-
critical out quick Ionic seems to be much easy to use comparing to React
Native. I wish someone can produce a similar project on top of React-Native(or
whatever modules they choose) soon.

~~~
kabes
Angular 2 has Ionic & React native ;)

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macinjosh
Does 'futurice' rhyme with 'uterus' or how the heck to do you pronounce that
name?

~~~
ttur
There's no consensus even within the company. Fortunately we're primarily the
types who avoid social situations where you cannot communicate by typing.

------
mtw
What about Relay and graphQL?

~~~
jevakallio
Great question! We are investigating adding Relay support, as well as a
PostGraphQL endpoint (Postgres+GraphQL) to the soon upcoming Pepperoni Backend
Kit.

Right now we've included what we know works well, and we don't yet have
experience with Relay in React Native apps. Contributions welcome, though :)

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rplnt
Now to start them faster!

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ychompinator
Pepperoni is the worst kind of Pizza.

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sdegutis
It took a while to find the "getting started" page:

[https://github.com/futurice/pepperoni-app-
kit/blob/master/do...](https://github.com/futurice/pepperoni-app-
kit/blob/master/docs/SETUP.md)

Ultimately, I'm rooting for libui[1] over React Native or anything related to
it. But the more competition, the better, since competition seems to usually
drive innovation.

You know, it's kind of funny how we've come full circle. 15-20 years ago,
developers were experimenting with all sorts of new GUI ideas.

I remember using a program that had something that looked like scrollbars, but
the mouse's scroll-wheel wouldn't work on them, and you couldn't drag them
either, you could only scroll by clicking the arrow buttons on the top and
bottom. But man, it looked super sleek, like it came straight out of the movie
Aliens or something!

And now we're doing the same thing. Reinventing GUI so that it's pretty, but
ends up being broken. I wish I could find that one tweet from a year ago or
so, where someone said that scrolling a certain web page triggered no less
than something like 67 animations.

[1] [https://github.com/andlabs/libui](https://github.com/andlabs/libui)

~~~
ausjke
aren't they totally different? libui is more of a "legacy/desktop" UI method
with a C-API, while React-Native is for web/apps.

~~~
sdegutis
They have the same goals.

From React-Native's website:

> _React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on
> native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript
> and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all
> the platforms you care about — learn once, write anywhere._

From libui's website:

> _Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the
> native GUI technologies of each platform it supports._

They're both cross-platform GUI libraries. They take different approaches, but
they aim to do the same basic thing: let you write cross platform desktop apps
more easily.

~~~
distances
> but they aim to do the same basic thing: let you write cross platform
> desktop apps more easily.

No, that's not correct. React Native is mobile platforms only (iOS and Android
now, perhaps Windows and Tizen later), while libui is desktop only.

