The NativeScript 4.0 release primarily removes limitations and improves flexibility in working with NativeScript, the open-source framework for developing native apps on the Apple iOS and Android platforms. NativeScript 4.0 adds flexibility to UI Views, refined templates for creating applications, and additional utilities to streamline native application development.
With NativeScript 4.0, developers can use any View as the root of an application, enabling more commonly-used navigation patterns and allowing the creation of more optimized user interface trees.
Additionally, the use of Modal Views is more flexible, removing the previous limit of showing only one modal at a time. While many user experience designers may not recommend this approach, it is now possible to render a modal dialog from inside another modal dialog.
NativeScript provides a collection of application templates to help developers get started building a native mobile application, as well as a new enterprise authentication template. The previously monolithic NativeScript UI plugin is now available as individual components.
The project also includes utilities for generating all versions of application assets, generating icons and splash screens based on a single high-resolution image. This release also improves NativeScript’s integration with webpack.
NativeScript gets widely used within the Angular community, but that is changing. While React users tend to use React Native, other frameworks are offering ways to work with NativeScript. For example, the NativeScript-Vue 1.0 plugin was recently released, integrating Vue and NativeScript to allow developers to build native mobile apps using Vue.
NativeScript provides a mechanism for web developers to build cross-platform, native iOS and Android apps without web views by using modern JavaScript or TypeScript to get native UI and performance while using traditional web development skills.
To get started with NativeScript, install it via npm:
npm install -g nativescript
Visit the NativeScript website for more information. NativeScript is available via the Apache 2 open source license, and contributions are welcome via the NativeScript GitHub project.