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

Summary


We covered a lot in this chapter. You learned how the Declarative UI works, from the XML parser and how it parses to how to develop your screens in Declarative UI. You also learned which component handles all the events in the system. In addition, you learned how visual components, by being a descendant in the view tree, all have access to a large number of properties, events, and methods. Then, we learned how NativeScript styles your pages and components. Next, we learned how to use the CSS to style a single item on a single page to every item on all pages in our application. Finally, we made our application stand out a lot more by styling the main items.

Now that you have a solid understanding on how the entire system works, we are going to change the sample application into a real communication application in the next chapter. We are going to dig into lots of code, CSS, and Declarative UI. We will also get to look at several new visual components and finally use several non-visual...