Meanwhile, the framework for building native iOS and Android apps in JavaScript has improved debugging and Angular performance Credit: Scott Robinson With NativeScript 2.5 recently reaching developers’ hands, the open source mobile framework’s builders are readying version 3.0 for an April release. NativeScript enables development of native mobile applications for iOS and Android using JavaScript, producing one code base. Version 3.0 includes improvements to maximize NativeScript runtime performance, and it speeds up refreshing changes, debugging, and introspecting of variables. In NativeScript, the native platform’s rendering engine produces JavaScript modules and UIs. The framework supports development using not only JavaScript, but also TypeScript and Google’s Angular framework; NativeScript supplements Angular when it comes to building mobile apps, providing access to native platform APIs and components. Version 3.0 is set to be up to date with whatever the latest version of Angular happens to be; Angular 4 has been anticipated for release in March. NativeScript 2.5, released at the beginning of the month, included integration with Chrome DevTools for debugging, ahead-of-time compilation to improve boot-up on Android devices, step debugging, and UI tree inspection. A new release of the NativeScript UI was featured as well, with a more customizable DataForm control for building mobile forms, and bundling code with the WebPack module bundler was made easier. In conjunction with version 2.5, Progress also published a functional testing framework to improve software builds. JavaScriptMobile DevelopmentSoftware Development