Languages and Frameworks Thoughtworks Technology Radar blipping about cross-mobile platforms. Although we were skeptical of them at first, these tools have been perfected and widely adopted over the years. And nobody can debate the enduring popularity and usefulness of React Native. Capacitor is the latest generation of a line of tools starting with PhoneGap, then renamed to Apache Cordova. Capacitor is a complete rewrite from Ionic that embraces the progressive web app style for stand-alone applications. So far, our developers like that they can address web, iOS and Android applications with a single code base and that they can manage the native platforms separately with access to the native APIs when necessary. Capacitor offers an alternative to React Native, which has many years of cross-platform experience behind it. 82. Java 17 Assess We don’t routinely feature new versions of languages, but we wanted to highlight the new long- term support (LTS) version of Java, version 17. While there are promising new features, such as the preview of pattern matching, it’s the switch to the new LTS process that should interest many organizations. We recommend organizations assess new releases of Java as and when they become available, making sure they adopt new features and versions as appropriate. Surprisingly many organizations do not routinely adopt newer versions of languages even though regular updates help keep things small and manageable. Hopefully the new LTS process, alongside organizations moving to regular updates, will help avoid the “too expensive to update” trap that ends with production software running on an end-of-life version of Java. 83. Jetpack Glance Assess Android 12 brought significant changes to app widgets that have improved the user and developer experience. For writing regular Android apps, we’ve expressed our preference for Jetpack Compose as a modern way of building native user interfaces. Now, with Jetpack Glance, which is built on top of the Compose runtime, developers can use similar declarative Kotlin APIs for writing widgets. Recently, Glance has been extended to support Tiles for Wear OS. 84. Jetpack Media3 Assess Android today has several media APIs: Jetpack Media, also known as MediaCompat, Jetpack Media2 and ExoPlayer. Unfortunately, these libraries were developed independently, with different goals but overlapping functionality. Android developers not only had to choose which library to use, they also had to contend with writing adaptors or other connecting code when features from multiple APIs were needed. Jetpack Media3 is an effort, currently in early access, to create a new API that takes common areas of functionality from the existing APIs — including UI, playback and media session handling — combining them into a merged and refined API. The player interface from ExoPlayer has also been updated, enhanced and streamlined to act as the common player interface for Media3. 85. MistQL Assess MistQL is a small domain-specific language for performing computations on JSON-like structures. Originally built for handcrafted feature extraction of machine-learning models on the frontend, MistQL currently supports a JavaScript implementation for browsers and a Python implementation for server-side use cases. We quite like its clean composable functional syntax, and we encourage you to assess it based on your needs. © Thoughtworks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 36