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.