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

Android and iOS differences


Since each of the platforms is implemented by totally different teams, each platform has its own particular awesome and horrible behavior. When possible, NativeScript wraps them all up and attempts to make a cohesive whole that works in a similar way on both platforms. This means for the most part, the component will work identically, but there can be discrepancies, which you may have to take into consideration. We will look at a couple of differences in depth.

The soft keyboard

One difference that you might have already noticed in our crossCommunicator application is that on Android, when you click on the text entry box and the soft keyboard pops up, the message log part of the screen automatically shrinks and the text entry box is still visible. This is something that Google engineers built into Android. We get this awesome behavior for free. However, on iOS, when the soft keyboard appears, it just goes over everything on the bottom part of the screen. In this...