NativeScript warms up to AngularJS for mobile dev

NativeScript, Telerik’s open source platform for building native cross-platform mobile applications, has moved to a 2.0 release this week, highlighted by integration with the planned AngularJS 2 Web development framework.

NativeScript leverages both JavaScript and TypeScript and uses native components and direct access to native APIs for iOS and Android development. “NativeScript 2.0 [offers] the ability for the Angular community to reuse their Angular 2 code base or at least standardize on Angular 2 for both Web and mobile,” Dan Wilson, ‎product marketing manager for Telerik, said.

Version 2 of AngularJS, or Angular, is a rewrite of the framework that went into a release candidate stage this week. Integration between Angular 2 and NativeScript is being offered via a public beta.

NativeScript 2.0 also includes an experimental feature to make Android applications load much faster, and performance boosts are on the way. “The next major feature in terms of performance will be to allow background execution for tasks that do not belong on the main UI thread,” said Valio Stoychev, NativeScript product manager. “This will help in certain scenarios like image decoding or doing complex calculations using JavaScript only.

During the past year, NativeScript has added support for third-party libraries in iOS and Android, including native repositories like Maven, and support for npm.js plug-ins. Richer backing for CSS and Visual Studio Code support also have been added. Security and code encryption capabilities were shipped in March to select customers, and Windows Runtime capabilities were previewed in March.

The road map for NativeScript involves extending Windows support, and multi-threading and developer improvements are in the works as well. “We will be introducing significant improvements in the performance of our hot reload functionality, allowing you to preview the changes in code in less than a second on the device,” said Stoychev.