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

Test frameworks


There are several different testing frameworks for JavaScript. So, if you have your own favorite testing framework, most of this advice would also apply to it. In this case, we will use Mocha. It is a fairly popular testing framework, so you can easily find many samples and examples on how to use it on the mochajs.org website. However, we will get you up and running with NativeScript. The first thing you need to do is open a terminal shell and install mocha with the npm install –g mocha command. The -g option will tell npm to install mocha globally, just like we did when we installed the nativescript command. By making it globally available, you can run it just by typing mocha anywhere.

Note

Mocha is a JavaScript testing framework. This framework runs under node, so everything we are doing with the testing is all using node-based code. This might be confusing sometimes as JavaScript is simpler compared to NativeScript. So, even though we are loading and testing our code that...