Mobile App Development Efficiency with Native Script and Angular
I-softinc are always
changing, and with that, consumer expectations evolve as well. In the past year
alone, the technology landscape has shifted immensely. As such, business
leaders are faced with the objection of either adapting to the new consumer assumption
or falling behind. This is especially true in mobile. To meet both consumer
demand and expectations, companies must develop for both mobile and web.
Unfortunately for many, there are no easy ways to go about doing so. Developing
for both platforms is complex, but with the right tools and framework, the
process is a little easier.
The Need to Go
Cross Platform
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In
today’s competitive climate, businesses are now more than ever focused on
application development in an effort to propel their organizations into the
digital age. According to survey data from Progress, half of the respondents plan to
invest in building apps that support the customer engagement model in the next
12 months, and nearly half (47 percent) plan to invest in mobile methods to
support operational improvement efforts, customer engagement initiatives and
process improvements for agility with website, mobile and social platforms.
However, developing native apps in different
languages across Android, Windows, iOS and web is expensive and very time
consuming. Plus the current hybrid access usually fail to deliver the same achievement
that native apps enable while consumers’ expectations around app performance
continue to rise.
How to be More
Efficient When Developing
Progress
Native Script is a
cross-platform framework and allows for true native apps to be built from a
single code base, while still enabling the productivity advantages familiar to
hybrid approaches.
Therefore, the developer only needs to know
one language to get true native achievements and functionality across
platforms. However, the language can be JavaScript, Type Script, and in this
case, Angular.
Angular 2, the full-platform successor to
Google’s Angular 1 web application framework, is based on newer JavaScript
standards, bringing a better, faster, more powerful framework to developers
across the globe. Angular 2 has been developed and optimized for productivity
and performance. It tends to work best in non-trivial apps – apps that have 10
or more views, or deal with a significant amount of data. But when used
properly the framework allows for the deployment of the fastest, smallest apps across
web and mobile environments.
Native Script does not require Angular, but
it’s more effective when used in tandem. In doing so you can fully reuse skills
and code from the web to build beautiful, high performance native mobile apps
without web views. One of Angular biggest structural changes was decoupling the
Angular framework form the DOM. While Angular was limited to browser-based
environments, Angular opened the door for a number of different rendering
possibilities, including Native Script.
Together, the collusion between Native Script
and Angular was created to provide an answer to the question above. Here are
some tips to get the most out of Angular 2 and Native Script:
Standardize on Angular 2 to Simplify – It’s
One Less Thing to Learn.
When tasked with advocating multiple
languages, it’s easy to understand the complication involved, both in
development and recruitment. Standardizing on Angular 2 allows for a consistent
technical architecture to let developers solve common issues in standard ways,
enabling employees be more efficient. There are plenty of Angular developer in
the world so it’s also easy to find new talent when needed.
Native Script supports Angular 2 and allows
for true native performance on mobile apps – without having to learn multiple
native languages. By using native parts, the framework offers a native look,
which give users the experience they both expect and demand.
When it comes to developing, think of how
much work you’d have to do to build simple Android and iOS apps using
traditional native development approaches. In the case of a button, you’d have
to take multiple steps across Android and iphone to achieve what you need to.
But with Native Script and Angular 2, you can build that same button in a few
lines of code; write the code in JavaScript/Type Script; place the button in an
Angular 2 component; style that button with CSS; install JavaScript modules to
help you out from npm; and at the end of the day, there is only one code base
to maintain.
Using Angular 2 in Native Script also opens
up another possibility: the ability to share code between web and native apps. Native
Script code is just JavaScript, so long as that code isn’t tied to the DOM,
there’s no reason that code can’t run in Native Script.
Keep Your Code Modular
If you keep your user interface code separate
from your business logic, you have the ability to share large amounts of
functionality across multiple platforms. For example, consider the common
scenario of registering a new user in your application. This performance
usually involves sending data to a backend service through an HTTP call, and
receiving a token in response. There is nothing about this code that is
specific to an individual mobile platform, yet with traditional development
approaches you’d have to write this code three times—once in Swift or
Objective-C for IOS, once in Java for Android, and once in JavaScript or Type
Script for the web. With Native Script and Angular 2 you have the ability to
write a single Angular service that runs on all three platforms.
Not all code can be shared this way, and you
will have to code the user interface twice—once for native IOS and Android, and
once for the web. But if make an effort to keep your code modular, and keep
code that doesn’t involve the interface in separate files, you have the
potential to save a considerable amount of development time when writing apps
that target multiple platforms.
Moving Forward
The collaboration between Angular 2 and Native
Script is significant as it allows you to write once and deploy across multiple
platforms. Developing across multiple platforms used to be avoided by
developers, but by utilizing both Angular 2 and Native Script, you can save
both time and cost. As technology progresses and improves, the enterprise will
always have to meet the needs and demands of the consumer, but when two
frameworks are able to work seamlessly together for the foreseeable future, the
lives of developers become significantly easier.
