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

Debugging your application


NativeScript uses the built-in Chrome debugging tools to allow you to debug your application on Android and a similar set of tools in Safari for iOS. You can start the debugging in one of two ways. You can start the debugging when you launch your application using nativescript debug android --debug-brk [--device / --emulator / --geny] to launch your application with the debugger active. The second way is if your application is currently running, you can use nativescript debug ios --start [ --device / --emulator / --geny] to connect to an already running application.

Note

NativeScript currently requires a working Internet connection for debugging. It also requires Chrome to be installed to debug Android applications.

Once you have launched the debug tools, you should see something like this on Android:

This is the Node inspector that you can use in Chrome to debug your web pages and even node apps. NativeScript is leveraging the same code that Google wrote for Chrome...