Show HN: Make an app by adding JSON to this app

I've built similar platforms. Naturally, I think they are awesome. They are a core part of very valuable products like SAP, Salesforce, etc. You will get a lot of push back from high developers who prefer direct access to the native api or html. Please don't let them discourage you. My response to them is that they can build reusable components that are driven by your json layer (win-win). There are enough developers who will benefit. Try to get funding sooner than later. I waited too long. You can't keep up building this by yourself.

Guys, the author here. This is my first open source project and I worked really hard on it for 5 months.<p>I think it&#x27;s really cool, and I hope you guys like it. I would appreciate any kind of feedback!

Instead of JSON, you could also consider sending XML markup. Oh wait, or maybe reuse an existing SGML&#x2F;XML standard called...HTML.<p>And then you could add scripting...

I found it interesting that the author has actually submitted the same idea 4 times to varying degrees of interest:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=gliechtenstein" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=gliechtenstein</a><p>It’s easy to forget that good ideas take a lot of time and iterations until they become magical. Great things do not happen overnight and without much sacrifice. The majority of people would give up the first time the community dismissed their prototype.<p>Big props for not giving up.

Very cool.<p>For what it&#x27;s worth most med-high profile games are built on similar techniques albeit at a larger scale. You&#x27;re largely building tools and reusable components that let designers, artists and animators define behavior, look &amp; feel.<p>It goes by a couple different names but the most common one I see is &quot;Content Driven Development&quot;. As you&#x27;ve noticed it has all sorts of benefits like fast iteration time, updates on the fly and ability to allow non-coders to bring in their perspectives to build experiences.<p>Don&#x27;t let the ivory tower haters get you down, it&#x27;s a very powerful and valid approach in the appropriate domains.

Been there, done that. When I coded games, I made some simple JSON based file format and almost whole game was in form of JSON. I even implemented conditional and loops in JSON.<p>But It can easy lead to inner platform effect. Not needed complexity. And in JSON you can&#x27;t write JS code (needed for e.g. event handlers).<p>So I switched to JS. Still data-driven approach (simple hierarchical objects with data), but with power of JS (and if you&#x27;re use Babel, you could use JSX for your DSL).<p>So: I don&#x27;t think JSON is best format for what you try to achieve. It&#x27;s just so limited.<p>Besides what is added value of Jasonette? When I look on Jasonette I have feeling that it&#x27;s just reinvents ReactJS but in JSON not JSX. Not sure if there is much profit with JSON format alone.

Really great stuff!<p>What is the most advanced application you have created with this? What functionality do you think is still lacking?<p>If you were to try to create a full featured app I imagine you&#x27;d find that working in Swift is the better option.<p>What this reveals to me is that the App Store submission and update process is so time consuming you would rather write your logic in Json than in native Swift&#x2F;ObjC.<p>If Xcode let you instantaneously push app binary updates would this be as useful?

This is very interesting, although JSON is not a very comfortable format to build manually - I think writing in YAML or CSON would be much cleaner to read&#x2F;write, and easily converted to JSON. Also, any plans on building a UI for generating this JSON? If you have predefined components, you could make some sort of designer that builds the JSON for the user, that could turn into a commercial project I think.

Wow this is really impressive.<p>If you had enough JSON-to-native &quot;modules&quot;, basically anyone could write a native app in a few hours (since functionality in most apps is pretty much standard stuff)!<p>Hell, if you pushed this further you could create an app store for code, letting you buy additional modules to plug into your app like lego.

Wow that is actually a brilliant idea. Would you ever consider making an android version?

Very neat and well put together! Thank you for taking the time to prepare nice documentation to go along with it! Congrats on your release!

Congratulations! I think you have &quot;discovered&quot; QML, my favorite environment for rapid GUI development, incredibly intuitive. You may want to to look into that for inspiration.

This is really cool.<p>Why not also support the web? With an Immutable store you could easily use react to display this app on the web without needing native install.<p>Great job. Look forward to seeing where this goes.

What would be the feasability of an Android port? I like the concept, but hate that it&#x27;s for a platform that I refuse to touch with a ten-foot pole.

Students (especially younger ones) often need more help seeing the light at the end of the learning tunnel. Something like this is a great start to teaching development and spurring them onto an actual language.<p>I usually don&#x27;t start with CSS let alone SCSS for websites, basic HTML shows them instant results for what they typed and gives them more endurance for the longer learning curve (but more power) provided by CSS.

OK, this obviously looks like a web browser (native...) using json instead of (xml-like) html, though it&#x27;s not good as a markup language.<p>Interesting is having declarative templates on the client side, instead of server-side, for accessing json APIs. Of course you can do this in browsers (and it is done), but this is cleaner and simpler, being a fresh reinvention.

Is anyone working on an Android port? I&#x27;d definitely want to give it a go.<p>Haven&#x27;t checked yet, but is there a spec for the json?

Small detail I enjoyed from your website (on mobile, might be different for desktop) : header text positioned to the right of the screen (or content div).<p>Position right is something we don&#x27;t see often. This shows it is a great way to make your page easier to read.

I&#x27;m at a restaurant reading this so I haven&#x27;t had a chance to test it out yet but having reviewed the website I already see a massive use for this: Programmatic app building. This is an awesome idea. I can&#x27;t wait to play with it.

This plus Huginn will be awesome for dynamic apps

Looks like a new name from jasonclient.org. Previously discussed 6 months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11736817" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11736817</a>

Nice to see you getting so much positive feedback, here is some negative feedback balance it out:<p>* How is this different from any of the other declarative app building systems that have, as yet, failed to take the world at large by storm?<p>* Why JSON? I get it&#x27;s universal but it&#x27;s also annoying to write. Why didn&#x27;t you consider YAML or , even better, HOCON?<p>* Do you really think loop syntax in a declarative language is a good idea, because to me it always comes across as a nasty anti-pattern to get around the fact that declarative languages don&#x27;t tend to handle this well?<p>Otherwise, nice effort. Better than anything I&#x27;ve ever shown to the world :-)

This seems similar to what is used internally at AppSpotr[1] (disclaimer: I&#x27;m a former employee). They also use JSON to represent apps that can be rendered in iOS&#x2F;Android clients. The difference is that apps must be built using a WYSIWYG editor rather than by editing the JSON directly.<p>From my experience, a JSON representation works very well for a big percentage of all the apps out there, and you can often do without custom code. Good job creating this open-source version, it looks very expressive and useful!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.appspotr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.appspotr.com&#x2F;</a>

So what this is, is an IOS hypermedia (AKA true REST) client, for consuming APIs serving a custom (as opposed to generic) hypermedia format.<p>The format itself is designed for a particular problem domain, namely outputting mobile-application specific controls and behaviours.<p>It would be an interesting exercise to extract those aspects into a custom vocab for JSON-LD + Hydra (or Siren, or (insert) other generic hypermedia formats).<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.markus-lanthaler.com&#x2F;hydra&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.markus-lanthaler.com&#x2F;hydra&#x2F;</a><p>It would also be interesting to have the hypermedia format defined as a schema somewhere.

Is this HTML reinvented? :)

This is really great one. Shameless plug, we&#x27;ve built similar (but smaller) concept for the filter form of our apps[0] (cross platform, natively for Web, Android and iOS) mainly because we were tired of having to change the search filter form fields and logics in every app update. Now, we just have to change the configuration and the filter form changes instantly.<p>[0]: web version can be found at - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.99.co&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;rent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.99.co&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;rent</a>

This is awesome! I actually had this same idea and built a platform for non-technical people to have the ability to build native apps. We picked Xamarin.Forms as our mobile framework because that way we could target most of the mobile platforms and share as much code between those project. We also picked Drupal a CMS to give non-techies an easy framework to build things out. I am going to keep an eye on this project for some different ideas and maybe one day we can pick your brain with our idea&#x2F;platform.

This looks very cool. And tempting at the first glance. As I read more of the documentation, I can&#x27;t help stop comparing it with React-native for the rendering part. I remember somebody mentioning server-rendered mobile apps in one of the early react-native apps. This is pretty much achieving that.<p>However, the comparison ends there. This is great! Its just too simple to make an app and probably when the app grows one could create a transpiler to generate this json

Android and web dev here, how would you compare this to nativescript and such? Instead of learning a new dsl, isn&#x27;t web to native simpler? Unless you&#x27;re developing a game I&#x27;ve never found native to be necessary. I&#x27;m one of those devs who moved from native to hybrid for faster development speed<p>[edit] I really like how you&#x27;re participating in the comments and how you reply. I really hope you do well, you seem like a nice person :-)

One use case: you have a game or app, and want to publish rich promo screens for new features or in game events. Even to old versions of clients. We once built a tiny in-house framework for this, based on Lua (game downloaded a package of Lua script and image resources and displayed the promo). If there was something ready to use (and multiplatform - at least android and ios), we could have saved quite some development time.

I know, it is too simple, people&#x27;s head just exploded.<p>Well, there seem to be great number of uses for this. I think this is excellent idea. Off to make an app... or two.

I tried building the instagram clone but get:<p>Failed to create provisioning profile. The app ID &quot;home.master.Instagram-UI-example.Jasonette.com.githubusercontent.raw&quot; cannot be registered to your development team. Change your bundle identifier to a unique string to try again.<p>Anyone knows whats up? I ran the setup and inputted 2 and supplied the URL from the Github..

I made something very similar in 2004. Instead of JSON, you would supply PHP arrays. The enabled to mix in some conditional code and make it more flexible for different usage patterns. We shipped a pretty big ERP application this way. I have since left the company, but the software still works on 200+ installations.

How do app permissions work? Is there a way to make Jasonette request only the permissions needed by my JSON?

Late to the game--where does logic go? Looping? DB access? Would they be written in Objective C as actions?

This is very cool! Do you have a spec to share? First thing i thought of is that it would be awesome to write webapp and static site generator implementations of the jason spec.<p>Im in the process of making my own static site, and im storing as much of configuration and content as possible in json.

This is a wonderful idea! Making app development faster and easier can only be a good thing.<p>Now if only it were possible to place a generic version of this app on the App Store and allow users to load in the JSON for whatever app they want. Sadly I very much doubt Apple would allow it.

This is quite useful with a Huginn server setup to dynamically feed JSON out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cantino&#x2F;huginn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cantino&#x2F;huginn</a>

Neat project! I&#x27;ve been working on something similar here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mcudich&#x2F;TemplateKit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mcudich&#x2F;TemplateKit</a>

Native app newbie here. Can this solution be used to present data tables?

Well you do need to be a little bit of a programmer. You have loops in there, and evaluating properties of objects, etc. Interesting idea and it looks like you&#x27;ve done a nice job of it.

Hey Buddy!, Great concept and smooth execution. Something for Android?

Cool idea. But I&#x27;m wondering if this is allowed in the App Store?

This is nice. I always wondered why something like this isn&#x27;t available. I built a nested tab-bar menu system for an e-commerce app recently which can be generated from a json file.

What about Push Notifications? Are they supported somehow?<p>Great project, by the way!

Is is possible to include some kind rich text&#x2F;html editor that can send data back to a server via JSON? Is it possible to send any user data back to a server with Jasonette?

Congrats on the release !<p>this actually reminded me of a startup which lets you create a native app using API documentation ( swagger ).<p>Edit : If I can find the bookmark, I will the link to that startup here.

This is awesome. Do you plan on releasing an Android version?

&gt; &quot;text&quot;: &quot;{{$jason.find(&#x27;#about h2&#x27;).text().trim()}}&quot;<p>Yeah, you can only get so far being declarative. Miracles don&#x27;t happen.

The more I scrolled down this page the more impressed I got.<p>What&#x27;s the performance like? Does it handle switching views back and forth? Keep state?

Great Job.<p>This is the next iteration of Titanium Appcelerator and Xamarin style apps (which basically do the same thing but internally).

I would recommend adding documentation for shipping to the App Store.<p>Even if it&#x27;s as simple as &quot;just build and submit&quot;.

Never thought you could do that much with just JSON, this looks very promising for students or for fast prototyping.

Is there support for loading more pieces of the app on demand (so the server can generate them?)

This looks really interesting. How can you localise an app&#x27;s UI when using this?

Looks cool but what kind of apps are you supposed to build with this?

This is great. I am new to iOS and this seems very promising.

FWIW, the name is quite similar to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;jsonnet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;jsonnet</a>

how to make an app in 15 min | How to develop a mobile app free <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tnsYachOafk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tnsYachOafk</a>