Hello Fellow Tizen Developers,
I’ve just started my learning process of developing watch friendly mobile (business) applications, and I picked Tizen and Galaxy Watch. I have some experience with Android WearOS (Java) and Apple Watch (Swift), but I found terribly cumbersome to maintain two significantly complex development environment. I am very happy that Tizen supports web applications with its TAU CSS library and JavaScript watch API. Tizen is the only major watch OS today where you can build your watch applications with web development tools. Since version 16.8 with hooks and TypeScript support, React JS is a near perfect web framework, powerful still elegant. Unlike Kai OS, React is not supported directly by Tizen dev tools, but with the Tizen command line interface tools, it could be possible. I am not the first one who is interested in this topic, I found a nice project on github and I learned quite a lot from it.
I made a two part video, React for Tizen Part 1 and Part 2 about the results I got yesterday from experimenting on marrying React with Tizen.
Let me know, if you already have given a try to a similar project.
Take care and all the best,
Miklos
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To be honest, the only Tizen tool I am using for development is “sdb” (ok, if I need some native code, I am also using the command line compilers). Other than that, I am mainly building a web app, package it up using “zip” and sign it with a Python script I have written. The end result is that I can use the same app as a web app, a Firefox OS app and a Tizen app.
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As a followup of this first experiment, here is an alternative approach, instead of TypeScript I love Flow static type checking technology for JavaScript, too.
Tizen Web Application Development with Flow Static Type Checking
TypeScript has a number of advantages vs Flow, but it requires a compilation phase. Flow supports comment syntax, which keeps JS files directly runnable, no transpilation required.
I have tried Vue before, and it was working also very well. But the main issue was debugging. It’s probably same with React. To test the tizen api functions we need to debug the code.
Hi Miklos,
Great post! I’ve also switched over to developing watch faces using React. Have you had any more progress since last post? Thanks for sharing those videos btw. I’m also in the process of creating my own pipeline for this.
However, even though I really enjoy developing using React and the ease and speed of developing Watch faces using web stack, I am considering switching over to native. This more for performance reasons dealing with animations.
Do you have any good way of getting more performance out of developing with the web stack? Building the UI is great and snappy, but performance drops hard when you start to include animations. I’m mainly developing and testing on a GearS3 device… Maybe there’s a big performance gain on latest watch hardware?