With the sudden release of Version 2, and abrupt cease of updates to V1, those of us who developed large applications based entirely on V1 feel like they have been left in the dark. At least, I myself have this feeling. I do plan to upgrade to v2, but this will require restructuring my app and also will take time from my end. At this stage, I only require support for iphone x and I’m hopeful that it’ll be added very soon.
In any case, I would like to learn more about the future of Framework7. In particular, is V3 expected to come out any time soon ? If so, when ? Are there any breaking changes to be expected in v3 (as was the case with the transition from v1 to v2) ? What are the main advantages it’ll offer ? How long is support and maintenance expected to last for V2 ?
For me personally, I would love to be able to use one code base for my website, ios and MD applications. Currently, Framework7 is helping me maintain the last two. Website development is another story.
Perhaps Framework7 can be integrated with bootstrap or any other popular framework for web front end development ? Or perhaps it should have its web components ? In any case, I think F7 will attract a new and very wide range of potential followers if it were adapted to support website developments in addition to ios and MD. I know it’s not an easy task, but they’re all HTML, css and javascript at the end and there is a potential for a great overlap between them all which F7 should help with.
It actually wasn’t so sudden. The development began in May/June 2017. The first public beta was released in August until the stable v2 in December. Also there were few blog posts, forum posts, and messages in social networks.
No, v3 is not expected soon and i don’t see any reasons for it.
As for near future plans. The will be new repo (or probably added to the current F7 repo) of Framework7-Components. If you know there is a official F7-Vue package and separate F7-React repo that is not in align with main libs. And it is hard to mantain both of them, and will be even worse if need to add more frameworks support. So at the moment we are working on kind of universal component compiler that will allows us to declare component once (it has its own syntax similar to both Vue and React) and it will be compiled without any loose to Vue, React and WebComponent automatically. With this approach we won’t need to maintain different repos for different frameworks. Also, they will have common documentation.
Yes, I did read about the development of V2 in the forums and also noticed its new branch on github but I didn’t follow it closely. However, I expected it to be a simple upgrade targeting all users of the framework (new and old). Upgrading from a version to another used to be as simple as replacing the old JS/CSS files with the new. With v2, the structure of F7 has changed with so many breaking changes for old users. I totally understand that the new changes are for the best. However, an advance notice about v2 not being totally compatible with v1 would have been greatly appreciated.
The news about your plan to having universal components compiler for all three repos is great to hear. The current fragmentation of the F7 in having at least 3 repos (Vue,React and Vanilla JS) will be extremely hard to maintain in the long term. Perhaps this should be given much higher priority in the road map ? I hope this will eventually open the door for supporting the additional “responsive Websites” layer that I mentioned in my previous post.