Book Image

Getting Started with NativeScript

By : Nathanael J. Anderson
Book Image

Getting Started with NativeScript

By: Nathanael J. Anderson

Overview of this book

NativeScript allows you to build a fast cross-platform application that has a native UI. NativeScript is a true cross-platform framework that generates native speed applications using the native components of the host platform, all using JavaScript. Although NativeScript allows you to build your application in JavaScript, you have full access to the host OS from your code, allowing you to easily tweak or use new platform features instantly at native code speeds. Whether you have already developed multiple applications or zero applications, this book will help you to develop your next application in a cross-platform framework quickly, saving you a massive amount of time and money. This book concisely shows you NativeScript’s built-in framework that allows you to rapidly develop a fully-working compiled cross-platform application in just a few chapters. It starts by laying the foundation of NativeScript and working through the fundamentals to create a basic shell of the application. Moving on, you’ll see how to build a full-fledged application step by step. We’ll show you how to use plugins, and how to communicate with the native OS libraries easily so that you can customize your application as if your app was created in Java or Objective C. We then deal with the issues that arise from being cross platform and compensate for the different screen sizes, screen resolutions, and device abilities. Finally, we progress to testing and deploying your app.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Getting Started with NativeScript
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a second page


Now that we have an idea of all the project files and foundational components, why don't we do something cool and finish off this chapter by creating a brand new page and then using our newfound skills to navigate to it?

Creating additional files and pages

Some people might prefer individual subdirectories per page or some other project layout scheme. NativeScript has no issues with you creating your project system the way you want. For our project, and to keep things simple, we are just going to add any new files to our main app directory. To create a new page, we just need to create the files associated with a page. So, in this case, we need to create a single new file called settings.js in our main App folder. And then, finally, we need to make a change to the main-view-model.js file to show our new page.

Creating settings.js

In our application, we are going to need a settings page, so we are going to create the framework for our application settings page right now...