

Getting started on Firefox OS apps with AngularJS - janjongboom
http://glamour.tweakblogs.net/blog/8717/getting-started-on-firefox-os-apps-with-angularjs.html

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jlongster
This is very cool, nice work!

Judging from your items in the list, it looks like you started with Mozilla's
mortar library [1], which I work on, and completely rebuilt it. I really like
how you've structured it and all the stuff you've included -- it's a much more
powerful starting point than what we currently have with mortar.

We've been hard at work trying to figure out what we should do with mortar.
Naturally several other starting points have emerged, because that's how the
web works. We're excited about this. We, Mozilla, still want to give
developers something they can use to easily get started, but we'll most likely
refer to all the other ones too so the developer can choose between lots of
libraries (ember, angular, requirejs, etc).

Thanks for this, I'll keep it in mind as we write documentation on MDN for
writing Firefox OS apps!

[1] <https://github.com/mozilla/mortar-list-detail>

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AlexanderDhoore
I tried some FirefoxOS phones for about 20 minutes @ fosdem.

As a developer the idea of native html is tempting. As a normal user I'm
rather unimpressed.

"What can this do, that my Android can't?" Without the answer to that
question, people won't get it.

~~~
janjongboom
For this (as I share his opinion), read the article from my collegue Sergi
Mansilla about the promise of Firefox OS:
<http://sergimansilla.com/blog/promise-of-ffos/>

~~~
AlexanderDhoore
I tried to analyse that article a bit.

Paragraph 1: Ok, so we have some serious competition.

2: We are not going to beat them, we are changing the game.

3: There is massive developer potential.

4: Html sucks, or does it?

5: Frameworks and compile-to-js save the day!

6: Not just HTML5, standardized HTML5!

7: Fixing the problem of "Several languages, frameworks, APIs" and "vendor
lock-ins"

8: Mozilla can be trusted.

So 2, 6 and 7 are the big promises. And 3 and 5 is how they are going to do
it. My question is this: yes there are lots of web developers, but are they
skilled enough for more advanced challenges? And are you really solving the
"Several languages, frameworks, APIs" problem? One could argue that there are
way to many javascript compilers, frameworks... already!

~~~
daleharvey
'Are web developer smart enough to build apps' seems like a pretty
disingenuous question.

And the problem isnt 'too many frameworks / languages', its the ones that run
on a single platform requiring you to write the same app 5 times that are the
problem.

~~~
AlexanderDhoore
I agree it's a bit disingenuous. But I believe, for example, that the fact
that Android is easier to develop for than iOS, delivers all the crappy "I
just got out of college" java apps.

And although they promote it as the platform to rule them all, reality is:
<http://xkcd.com/927/>

But I wish them all the best, of course.

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samtaylor29
Stop worrying about Firefox and make apps for Chrome.

~~~
Trezoid
See, this is why we have so many problems on the web. People targeting one
specific browser and completely ignoring the rest despite it working perfectly
fine in all of them if they just stopped to include some other prefixes.

DON'T make apps for chrome. Hell, don't make apps for FirefoxOS either. Make
apps for the web. Make them work everywhere, and stop trying to make "one
render engine to rule them all" happen, because it's bad for the whole
ecosystem.

~~~
daleharvey
This

As a dev on Firefox OS I had been trying to disuade us from promoting / people
from using the 'Building Blocks' ui library, it makes sense for the OS itself
to use it but for 3rd parties "I hope this becomes a bygone of separate apps
per platform"

I lost that, but I think it will come around as the platform matures, I will
always just be building web apps

~~~
janjongboom
The building blocks however, run as well on Android and iOS, which makes it a
UI library that is cross platform, other than a lot of libs out there that
currently only target Webkit (hi Sencha!).

