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

Using the Declarative UI for our settings page


Since we have now learned how the Declarative UI works, it should be a simple task to convert our JavaScript version, which we created in Chapter 2, The Project Structure, into a Declarative UI version. Let's see if you can accomplish this on your own. If you get stuck or just want to verify, please feel free to see how I did it. Let us start by creating a new settings.xml file.

Our settings.xml file

Let us see how much we have learned. I will ask a question, and you determine if you can answer it.

  • The first thing we need to do is create the _____ component. Yes, you are totally correct; the Page component is always first. Now, this next one is going to be tricky.

  • The next component you need is ____. If, you said StackLayout, you are close—the StackLayout will be needed, but we have one other component property that should actually come before it. You might want to read the source code to the settings.js file again to see if you can figure it out...