What's the difference between Apache Royale and React, Angular, Vue?

Question

I'm a React developer and bumped into this new technology. On the website, I found some interesting stuff. Can someone clarify where Royale differs from other Application frameworks such as React, Angular or Vue?

Answer 1

Apache Royale looks like a tool to build application for multiple platform more like flutter, reactnative, ionic/phonegap, electron etc. and seems like it uses Action script. React, Angular, Vue are javascript frameworks to create web/mobile apps.

Answer 2

@Yalamber suggests that Apache Royale uses ActionScript and implies that, unlike React and others, it does not have a JavaScript framework. In fact, when you develop in Apache Royale you write code using ActionScript and MXML, and can incorporate existing JavaScript libraries. But when you are ready to compile your code, it compiles to and runs as JavaScript.

There are two benefits, as far as I am concerned, to using Royale: first is that the development process is (to me, anyhow) clearer and easier to navigate than are many JS frameworks. Second is that I have a lot of legacy AS and MXML code and coding patterns that I can reuse in Royale with relatively minor changes.

Answer 3

The languages used in Apache Royale are MXML and ActionScript 3 - so a lot more structured than just plain JavaScript. If you're looking at things like Vue.js and Angular (I'm not so familiar with React) then you're creating components using templates and then adding functionality in JavaScript/TypeScript. In Royale you can create components in ActionScript (and/or MXML) and the functionality is written in ActionScript.

AS3 is a relatively strongly typed language although based on ECMAScript. You get a lot more structure with this (particularly than with JavaScript!) so it can be more robust and the additional type-checking and syntax checking means you can eliminate some potential problems earlier.

Royale is based on the earlier work by Adobe in creating the Flex framework (which targeted the Flash Player) - Adobe open-sourced Flex and the toolchains, so now these are updated so that the MXML/AS3 code can be compiled either into a SWF for the Flash Player, or into JavaScript for a normal browser. So you code in MXML/AS3 and you generate JavaScript code that can be run without needing the Flash Player.

So the overall approach is a lot more mature than the newer frameworks - in particular MXML/AS3 are mature languages used massively across enterprise web applications. Royale is also flexible in that it can be adapted to work with other component libraries i.e. you can either take the 'built-in' components for buttons, data grids etc, or you can wrap up existing JavaScript components so that they can be used within Royale.

And finally - if you have an existing Flex application, then this is a very good choice of technology to use if you're updating that to work without the Flash Player! We have used it a couple of times now within POC projects and it's definitely quicker/easier than having to completely rewrite a Flex app.