Was wondering how many of you have tried to turn your app into a native app using Jasonette? Looking to create a native app out of one of my sites, and I just came across it, and it looks intriguing.
I know we have a few topics mentioning it here, but all are well over a year old, and there has been a lot updated since then.
Keen to hear any experiences around it, difficulty, time it took, restrictions and how well the finished product functions as a proper app.
How does it compare to the likes of Dropsource if you’ve used that, too?
One key difference between Jasonette and Dropsource is the lack of a visual editor. You’re not really “coding,” as it’s just editing JSON files, but you’ll be doing that by hand instead of using a visual editor like what Bubble has.
I tinkered with Jasonette a bit, but never got to a production-level app with it. I found myself looking for other opportunities after a couple weeks. I think the tech is cool, but I’m really trying to be focused on what a total “no-code” stack can look like for non-technical founders, and Jasonette wasn’t that.
I haven’t had a mobile app go to production yet, so I wouldn’t say I’ve used anything. I’ve played with Dropsource, Kinetise, and Supernova Studio, but haven’t taken any solution to a production release.
The guys who have taken over Jasonette, now called Jasonelle have just added a new (beta) feature that will convert JSX files (React Native) into Jasonette. This means you could use something such as BuilderX which exports React Native from a drag and drop into Jasonette for an almost code free native app. Nowhere near as easy as Bubble, but it’s probably the closest thing there is to a code-free native iOS or Android app right now that’s not Dropsource ($999!).
Not direct. There’s no way to just simply convert it. You can kind of do the logic just copy and paste though - if you turn all your workflows into an API endpoint and you do all your logic straight off Bubble and just JSON the front end which is what I’ve done.
Creating JSON markup is really easy though. Don’t get turned off because it’s written in a code editor, it’s very logical and easy to understand once you spend a couple hours learning.
Just looking into jasonelle (jasonette). If I understand correctly you have to (re)build the front-end of your Bubble from scratch into the json markup of jasonette.
Now I was just wondering how would you retrieve data from de Bubble database of your app to for example show a list of items on the jasonelle based app?
Do you have to create data api’s for this and include these as data arrays using mix-in. Or is there another more pragmatic approach?
It would probably need to be a php script or a way to reformat a bubble api’s data into an array that works with the jasonette template system. My way of doing this would be have a middleman as a php script to do the reformatting and automatically put into a json file and then use that source json file in the Jasonette template, if you want completely dynamic data that updates every so often then a cronjob or api call would be best to execute the php script. As far as I know bubble can’t reformat that well.
Decided to carry on working on my node graph editor for Jasonelle/Jasonette, I plan to embed this node editor onto a bubble app and make a full web based visual jasonette builder online:
My new system will allow for making native mobile iOS & Android apps in a more visual way!
