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

The app folder


Wow! As you can see, a lot of stuff goes on just to create an application. Now, we are going to finally discuss the App folder structure; this folder is where we will spend the majority of our development time. We shall explore what the different types of files are for and how they are used to create an application. Since this is the primary development folder and contains your entire code base for your application, I would highly recommend you put this folder under source control and/or maintain backups of this folder. The App folder already contains a couple folders and a few files that are mentioned under the App folder files subsection. Let's look at both of these folders first and the files contained in them, and finally, we will look at each of the individual files in the App folder.

The .gradle folder

This folder is for the gradle build system; it basically only contains cache and data items that are used while the application is being built. This folder might be created...