From the course: Building Native Mobile Apps with NativeScript and Angular 2

Introduction to NativeScript - JavaScript Tutorial

From the course: Building Native Mobile Apps with NativeScript and Angular 2

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Introduction to NativeScript

- (Instructor) Let's back up for a moment and take a broader look at the technology we'll be working with in this course. Since this course utilizes a stack of technologies, it's important to understand where each technology sits and how it is used. NativeScript is a framework that let's you build cross platform, Native iOS and Android apps without webviews. With NativeScript, you can use Angular, TypeScript or modern JavaScript to build truly native apps. This way you can get Native UI and performance while sharing skills and code with the web and you get 100% access to native APIs via JavaScript and reuse with packages from NPM called CocoaPods and Gradle. At this point, you may wonder how NativeScript framework let Angular, TypeScript, and JavaScript run a native device while also supporting CSS for styling. At it's core, NativeScript is a run-time that leverages JavaScript virtual machines on the underlying platform. JavaScript Core on iOS and V8 on Android. Therefore, NativeScript will always be up to date and support the latest ECMAScript language specification available in those engines. NativeScript builds up a list of native APIs for iOS and Android using reflection, allowing direct translation of native objects to JavaScript objects. And this not only lets built-in modules and UI widgets to function, but it gives you, the developer, the power to program directly against the native APIs for each platform. But that's a very technical description, and not very useful to those that are just starting out with NativeScript. When I was first starting to learn NativeScript, it helped me to think of a picture of a bridge between native APIs and JavaScript. Direct native API access requires special care, and it's an advanced topic. Therefore, it won't be covered in this course. However, we will utilize many built-in modules and UI widgets in this course. We'll discuss more about UI widgets in the chapter about the user interface.

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