After quite a while of absence, I started working with AppStudio again in order to see if it could be the right IDE for my son.
…but I soon realized that testing on smartphones and tablets is somewhat cumbersome. For that reason, I wrote a small script to provide “live-reload” for AppStudio applications.
If you are interested (it’s open source and free): you will find source and instructions on GitHub. The package is available via npm and does not have to be installed if you use “npx”.
If I understand this properly, AppStudio already does this (with one exception).
If you use “Deploy to local folder”, AppStudio sets up a local server to run your app. After you make changes to your app, run again - it hot reloads the app on the server. It’s the quickest way to rerun your app.
The exception is that it does not automatically pick up changes to the files on the server made by an app other than AppStudio. My guess is that not many people do this.
Well, as I wrote: this works on the local desktop only - as soon as you want to test on external devices or more than one device, that procedure does not work any more.
Additionally, this also only works with the system’s default browser - as soon as you want to test your app on a different browser or on several browsers simultaneously, you’ll fail.
These restrictions made my work cumbersome which is why I wrote the abovementioned script.
And now its just fun to see how multiple windows update automatically upon a single local deployment…
That’s absolutely try, but easily resolved. You’re actually the first person to suggest listening on the public interface. That’s not something we’d do by default because it could lead to security problems, but we could easily expose a setting.
I’m surprised to hear this. It sounds like you’re seeing problems with hot reload with multiple windows open - which is a bug. What are you seeing? We’d like to fix this.