AiA 148: What’s New in NativeScript with TJ VanToll

On today's episode of Adventures in Angular, we have panelists Alyssa Nicoll, Ward Bell, and Charles Max Wood. We have a special guest, TJ VanToll of Progress. If you want to stay current with NativeScript, tune in!

[00:01:55] – Introduction to TJ VanToll

TJ works as a Developer Advocate for Progress, which is a software development company behind KendoUI, NativeScript, and few other tools.

[00:02:20] – NativeScript

NativeScript is completely free, completely open-source tool that lets you build iOS and Android native apps with Native user interfaces using JavaScript. It also provides built-in support for both TypeScript and Angular, as well. If you’re an Angular developer, it’s a tool that you can use to take Angular and build for Native iOS and Native Android.

[00:03:15] – Native apps using JavaScript core or v8 on Android

NativeScript uses Native UI components so they’re not using web view, the DOM, HTML, etc. For people that are coming from an Angular background, your apps look like Native apps. They’re using the same building blocks that you’d use if you’re building your app straight up in Xcode or Android Studio. You’re still building your apps the same way, the same file and folder structure, routing, etc. But the real learning curve that it takes to build NativeScript apps is that you have to use their user interface components to build your apps.

[00:05:35] – Template syntax

If you’re building a fairly complex Angular app, when you have all custom components, it’s going to look exactly like a NativeScript app. It’s basically using a suite of custom Angular components vs. using divs and spans as you’re building blocks.

Angular is an optional dependency. NativeScript, at its lowest level, it’s just a technology that’s allowing the communication between JavaScript and these Native objects. The reason why the team spends a lot of time working with Angular integrations is that the model that Angular uses happens to be a really good fit for NativeScript. Any JavaScript developer who doesn’t really like using frameworks at all, using these components and syntax that they’re not familiar with could make their learning curve a little bit heavy.

[00:08:05] – What’s new in NativeScript

Over the last 6 months or a year, the team’s focus has been performance, tooling, and plug-ins.

Performance:

In the last release, specifically, NativeScript 3.0 was shipped back in May. That release is really the combination of profiling over the NativeScript source-code based on how fast your apps start up, how you can render your UI, etc. There is a cost to working with NativeScript because we are letting you write your source code in JavaScript. The team’s effort has been in really optimizing how fast you can paint your UI’s, how fast you can transition from one page to the next, the startup time, etc. One of the performance penalties that NativeScript has is because you’re using JavaScript, there is one step that truly Native apps don’t have. Specifically, Angular is not necessarily known for being the world’s smallest JavaScript framework. But Angular is being known for being very tool able. So the team shipped a Webpack plug-in that helps you reduce the footprint of your app, which means faster start-up times when you’re using Angular with NativeScript.

Tooling:

The other thing that’s related to tooling with NativeScript is the command line interface. You build NativeScript apps with the command line interface. The team is working on adding some more visual tooling, more like a companion to the CLI. There are problems that visual tooling can solve like how do you build your icons? How do you deal with splash screens? How do you deal with some of these Native configuration files? There is a thing called NativeScript Sidekick that can help you with some of these tasks. There’s an early beta out now.

Plug-ins:

The team purposely try to keep NativeScript core light, trying to