Hi HN, I've worked on several apps in the past couple of years, and found that it takes too much effort going from having an idea to building an app and having the world use it. Also most cool ideas will never turn into an app because building an app is not a simple 5 minute thing.<p>I wanted a way to have an idea, turn it into a fully functional native app, and share it with the world, all in the next 5 minutes, as quick and easy as writing a blog post. That's why I built Jason.<p>Basically Jason lets you build a native interface to display and interact with any data format (csv, rss, html, json), any website, any API in any way you want, simply by writing a JSON markup and loading it. There's no need for compiling, building, deploying, or anything like that.<p>It's like a browser but instead of turning HTML into a web page, Jason turns your JSON into a native app. Everything from defining elements to styling to executing actions is described in a single JSON markup.<p>Please let me know what you think, or ask any questions. Thanks!
Very cool. I wrote a similar framework while I was working at a previous company that translates XML into iOS views. From my experience, this might not take off for regular native-app building, but it's invaluable in usecases where there is a base application and a high amount of configuration between various enterprise clients. Good luck!
Kudos for this, especially for generalizing from real apps. But I have criticisms.<p>Declarative approaches are appealing, but lack sufficient flexibility for general use. BTW arguably, browsers are native apps configured by html/css/js.<p>Html templates in json is unnecessarily confusing. It's unfamiliar and untooled.<p>Unfortunately, json paths are inadequate for api's in general. They can't extract data from within text, combine, compute, nor use complex sequential api queries to get the data you need. You could add all this, but coding in a data format is awful, compared with a designed syntax like javascript.<p>Still, it is appealing to have just "one json". Maybe people can live with html in json for that. If you also design the backend (or it's an isomorphic frontend to an existing api), data extraction by path should be OK.
This is awesome. I've been dabbling in a similar concept using CouchDB. Have you thought about using something like CouchDB to enable easy master-master replication of data between users? Also, is any part of this open source? Thanks!
Very cool! What lead you down this path? This is not too far from creating a client using the web view container and letting users specify urls to their "apps" with perhaps certain JS hooks or CSS classes being required of apps to be rendered/used correctly in your client. Take one step further and you could just build a browser and user apps are any valid url with no restrictions. You can see where am I going. Just wondering about what led you to your idea?
This is pretty cool, I'd love to see a way to save an app to your homescreen somehow (although, I'm not sure how iOS would let that happen) or perhaps a way to produce a pre-bundled jason+app—would that go against your objectives?
Looks neat but what about security? Can the json be configured in a way that compromises the data stored on the device. Aren't you basically allowing Jason agent to run any custom code?