Any plans to officially support mobile HTML/CSS GUI framework?

Any plans to officially support within Meteor Core a mobile HTML/CSS GUI framework? i.e. something like Framework 7:
http://www.idangero.us/framework7/#.ViiE9mRVhBc

It’s good to have non-core choices, but there’s so damn many ways to create mobile GUI that it’s super high effort to evaluate and pick something that isn’t going to be a nightmare implementing down the road.

+1

I liked the concept of Framework 7, but I did not really get how this could be integrated with Meteor, since it has its own ways of loading files / reactivity. In the end, I skipped further investigation since, as you said, evaluating all of these frameworks takes a lot of time.

@waldgeist how do you make your mobile GUI? Anything you can recommend?

At the moment, I’m using plain old Bootstrap, since this turned out the most reliable framework. I’m also “cherrypicking” some elements form Materialize and Semantic UI, by including only certain elements of these frameworks via SASS includes. This mix is not certainly not ideal, and my first plan was to use Materialize throughout. However, it turned out that Materialize is not really well-designed under the hood. You run into situations where certain combinations of elements just don’t fit together well. I’ve never had such kind of quirks with Bootstrap, so I returned to it. Pure Semantic UI might also be an option, but I found this framework too late to change everything again.

I just stumbled upon Framework 7 recently, since some guy posted it here. He already had integrated it with Meteor and was quite happy with it. However, when I downloaded some of the demo apps from the app store, I noticed some quirks as well (like views only updated the second time you tapped on them). I can just guess this has something to do with Framework 7’s own implementation of page element fetching. But I’m not sure, I did not invest more time, since the demo apps did not convince me. Although it looked quite promising, I have to admit.

Nope, not currently. We don’t really do anything at the moment with CSS frameworks, and that’s a whole new world that we can’t afford to jump into in the near future.

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@waldgeist Yeah, that guy was me :smiley:

I’ve uploaded a demo project on GitHub, you can check it out here:

https://github.com/dnish/meteor-framework7

@sashko What about https://www.nativescript.org/ ? At the moment, I think it could be connected to a Meteor app by Asteroid, but it would be very cool if there will be an “integrated” Meteor solution, because JS written native apps seem to be a big deal within the next 1-2 years.

I just wanted to second that Meteor is unlikely to include a mobile HTML/CSS framework as part of core. As mentioned, there are many choices, each with different tradeoffs, and I don’t feel we can afford to be opinionated here.

Having a way to write apps with a native UI in JavaScript is another story however. Although this won’t happen in the immediate future, I’m pretty sure a native option will at one point be part of Meteor’s mobile integration. I’m most excited about React Native myself, and I think it’s programming model best fits the reactive nature of the framework, but it’s still in its early stages, and other solutions like NativeScript might also take off.