Foreword

JavaScript developers faced a steep uphill battle if they wanted to write a mobile app. Not only did they have to learn completely new programming languages, they also had to deal with radically different development environments, as well as a dizzying set of testing and deployment procedures.

Today, NativeScript lets JavaScript developers write mobile apps from a single codebase using the language they already know and love--namely, JavaScript! By allowing you to use familiar frontend technologies, NativeScript drastically reduces the amount of time it takes you to write powerful and compelling iOS and Android applications.

However, it doesn’t stop with the JavaScript language. NativeScript also lets you write apps with the Angular framework, allowing you to code with a frontend framework on platforms that used to make you learn Swift, Java, and Objective-C.

In this book, you’ll learn how it all works from two of the NativeScript community’s most talented developers.

Nathan Walker’s list of contributions to the NativeScript world is too long for this foreword. Just to give you a taste though, Nathan Walker led the effort to create the NativeScript framework’s first theme. Nathan also maintains the most popular project to share code between Angular web and native apps. However, in my personal opinion, Nathan’s biggest contribution to NativeScript has been the tireless help he’s offered to countless developers throughout the NativeScript community.

Nathan might only be outdone by Nathanael, who was one of NativeScript’s first users and has been a regular in NativeScript’s community chat and forums since day one. Nathanael Anderson understands NativeScript’s inner workings better than most (all?) of the NativeScript team. He regularly contributes to all facets of the NativeScript framework, and he routinely shares his knowledge with the greater NativeScript world through his blog.

The two authors have the sort of real-world experience that you will need to cover these sort of topics in detail. Nathan can speak knowledgeably about the NativeScript core theme because he basically wrote the thing. Nathanael can talk about NativeScript unit testing approaches because he literally wrote the book on the topic.

I can’t think of two better people to learn NativeScript and Angular from--you’re in for a treat.

TJ VanToll
Principal Developer Advocate, Progress