Comment by pooriaazimi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pooriaazimi | Hacker News Reader

Looks very nice, but I have a feeling that it's like iOS Storyboards: Great for simple demo apps, but very painful when you have slightly more complex needs.

For example I don't know how it can handle the following (kinda conventional for a web app) situation: Multiple users, some are admins and some are regular users, with some shared "data" (like, an item for sale) between the two. Moderators can add/remove/edit items and edit/remove users, users can browse/buy items, etc. - I think if you're building an app like this, you really have to roll your own CRUDful server (with ruby or whatever)...

Oh, and BTW, RestKit[1] is probably much more mature and feature-rich than AFIncrementalStore.

[1]: http://restkit.org

> Great for simple demo apps, but very painful when you have slightly more complex needs.

Unlike Storyboards, the effort you put into writing against a REST API isn't wasted if you decide to roll a new, more complex REST API (which Heroku is fantastic for).

The whole point is to get the developer up-and-running as quickly as possible. Code for the API you'll eventually have, but get by with a rough scaffolding so you can experiment and iterate rapidly.

This is OT, but just in case there's a good solution, what were your problems with storyboards?

Sometimes the app is not a strict tree of view controllers, but rather a graph containing some cycles. It is here that the whole metaphor of the navigation controller and the visual tools that Xcode gives you to automate it kind of break down and you end up writing lots of hairy custom code to manage your transitions.

Sometimes things are presented modally here but get navigated to normally over there - and once again you're mixing metaphors, implementing some navigation in the storyboard and some of it in code.

I thought the same thing would be true with Auto Layout, but luckily that one seems to have been a bit more "baked" when it shipped, insofar as I've not had any trouble implementing complex views with it WITHOUT ever writing any code.

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