Did you switch to Onsen from another framework? Why?

[mug]

I’m interested in hearing from people who have switched to Onsen UI from other frameworks like Ionic, Kendo UI, Framework 7, Sencha Touch, etc. Why did you switch? Why do you still use Onsen?

Thanks in advance!

[Fran Diox]

@mug Hi! I’m sorry that you didn’t get an answer yet. As you can see this forum just started about two weeks ago and there are not so many users yet.
I hope you like Onsen UI so far and help us to increase the community. Feel free to post here any issue you have. We will try to point you in the right direction :smile:

[munsterlander]

@mug Sorry as well for not getting you an answer, I just learned about this forum today. So, let me give my background and all the different frameworks I have tried.

I am a ColdFusion, Flex (ActionScript), on databases (Oracle, MySQL, and MSSQL) programmer. When mobile dev started popping up, some of the first cross-platform tools looked very promising, especially because I do not do graphics (I am horrible at UI design). I first used Elips OpenPlug. It was awesome! My Flex code was compiled to native apps. Then they got bought out by Alcatel Lucent and that was that. Bye bye awesome tool.

So, at that point I decided to go native. My degrees were in C/C++ so I had a good base for Java and C#. My problem was, I just wasn’t strong enough in those languages nor was I given enough time to do some starter projects and so I ended up working on other stuff.

Then I heard about Xamarin. Great product, but their Forms is lacking at the moment and it just felt like I could get 50% with projects but not all the way. This led me to Ionic. Another great platform, but their cloud platform for UI design was lacking. I uncovered a few bugs and they confirmed them for me, but there is no solution at this time, so again, my project was dead. Additionally, the use of AngularJS is a show stopper for me. In my opinion, it is great for big robust applications, but for the small data driven apps that my company does, it is bloat that impedes rapid development (if you can’t tell, Angular is new and scary! ha!)

Onward ho to looking at Sencha and jQuery Mobile. Well, the money stopped me there and the horrible performance reviews regarding jQuery Mobile, so I left that be. I looked at Framework 7 and usually I was stopped by the use of Angular or some other large framework or the high cost for a dev license.

Then I found Monaca with Onsen. This in my opinion is the holy grail for me. The development (pure JS) fits my knowledge base without me having to learn anything other than some new syntax for the Onsen components. The Monaca cloud IDE is spectacular. It functions flawlessly for me and I don’t have to do any installations on my local machine as well as configuring anything. The UI is awesome and really helps with the overall UX.

In short, what has taken me months with other platforms, I have accomplished in weeks with Monaca and Onsen. Granted, poor @Fran-Diox has to be tired of answering my questions in stack overflow, but now I feel I have really gotten the hang of this platform and extremely quick. The dev license cost is exactly what I can afford. I am super stoked about Monaca and Onsen and my only fear is that they get bought out and another great product is removed from market.

[Yuki]

@munsterlander Thanks for your kind words and sharing the detailed thinking behind your choice. Great post!
Just wanted to let you know that we are profitably in business for more than 10 years (we started as a software development and developer education shop), although Monaca and Onsen products are a few years old, and we are not going anywhere! We don’t say never, but getting bought out is a very unlikely scenario. :-) So fear not! You can read more about us here.

[Fran Diox]

@munsterlander Thanks for your detailed post and don’t worry, I’m here to help :smile:. Keep asking whenever you have any doubt and feel free to write suggestions as well if you have.

[anandpatwari31]

I had some experience in kendo UI in past . Monaca and Onsen are really easy to understand and in very less time you can have your app ready.
I initially had problem with JQuery thus I learned Angular for this. Working with Angular is hard initially but once you know the concept , you can do lot of stuff.

[Gyorgy Orban]

Hi. I know this is an old thread but I have just found Onsen UI searching for an alternative to Ionic. I quite like the fact that Onsen is not tightly coupled with angular or other frameworks. I’m a bit worried though about the state of it. There seem to be some recent development going on but at the same time many links on the site / documentation are broken. Is Onsen still alive and actively developed? Is there a company behind it or is now more of a community effort? Has anything significant happened since this thread was updated about a year ago in terms of the support / team behind it? Thanks!

[Fran Diox]

@Gyorgy-Orban We are updating the website quite a lot recently, so I guess some links may break at times. Apart from that, development is quite active as you can see in the releases. As @Yuki mentioned a year ago, there is a company behind Onsen UI and that hasn’t changed. Of course, it is a free and open source project so the community plays an important role as well.
I think the framework and the community have grown a lot in the past year. We even assisted to conferences like VueConf, Angular Connect or React Europe.

[huybn5776]

@Gyorgy-Orban I also notice that some angular2 documentation and API is not complete than javascript version about many month, even monaca CLI dosen’t supper newer angular2 version that cause much angular2 library cannot compiler with it.
So, I’m trying to move my project to Ionic that support typescript 2.2+. :neutral_face:

Monaco is very convenient when someone use javascript (like live-sync), so i will continue recommended monaco to other colleagues that using JS.

[asial-matagawa]

@Gyorgy-Orban

There seem to be some recent development going on but at the same time many links on the site / documentation are broken.

In terms of the website, it was not available between 6pm~10pm (GMT+0) due to AWS setting. It is fixed now.

@huybn5776
Yes, the current Angular 2+ binding is not compatible with the latest version of Angular and Onsen UI.
Currently we are working on updating the Angular 2+ binding and Monaca CLI.
Thank you for understanding.