Open Source Insider

Progress NativeScript 5.0: hot modules & ‘playground’ code samples

Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater

New England headquartered Progress has announced the latest release of NativeScript, an open source framework for building native mobile apps with Angular, Vue.js, TypeScript and JavaScript.

Vue.js is an open-source JavaScript framework for building user interfaces — and Angular is a TypeScript-based open source frontend web application platform led by the Angular Team at Google.

This new release of NativeScript comes as the framework hits a milestone of 3.5 million downloads since its original launch in 2015.

NativeScript was created to attempt to ease the mobile app development process by ‘leveraging’ (Ed – we hesitate to use the L-word, but it does fit in this rare case) developers’ existing web development skills to create native mobile apps for iOS and Android.

According to Todd Anglin, VP of product and developer relations at Progress, this release NativeScript has improved developer productivity through capabilities including code sharing, hot module replacement, preview enhancements etc.

“In 2016, NativeScript 2.0 gave developers the ability to use Angular and NativeScript to create native mobile apps, but we wanted to take it a step further by enabling them to keep their code in one place and share business logic between web, iOS and Android,” said Brad Green, engineering director, Angular Framework, Google Inc.

Green says his team has worked closely with the NativeScript team resulting in the NativeScript-Schematics that integrates with the Angular CLI, making the user experience for developing both web and mobile within a single project completely seamless.

Among those new enhancements, hot module replacement allows for instantaneous, stateful application updates, avoiding full page reload, which in turn is supposed to help with accelerating the app development and debugging experience.

There is also a streamlined “Getting Started” experience – and easier development with ‘playground-compatible’ code samples available in the NativeScript Marketplace.