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

Places to find third-party components


Currently, there are three major places to find components. Each place has its own strength and weakness. The first one that we will explore is the official Telerik plugin site.

The Telerik plugin site

You can find the Telerik plugin site at http://plugins.telerik.com/nativescript. This site allows different developers to list any of their available free plugins. You can search or browse the site and find many different plugins built for NativeScript.

npmjs.com

The next site is https://npmjs.com, and it actually contains common modules and plugins for a wide range of products, such as Node.js, jQuery, Bower, Grunt, and many more JavaScript-based products. It is the most popular JavaScript repository. On npmjs.com, to find plugins for NativeScript, you can just type NativeScript in the search box and click on the Search button. It will list all the items that support NativeScript. You should also see a couple of listings for the official NativeScript libraries...