The digital age of mobile and web cross-platform development tends to support the paradigm of "learning once and writing anywhere." In brief: invent your application once and deploy it anywhere. Although we have not yet reached this magical junction of app and web development technology, we have made some great steps in that direction.
Mobile app development across the platform (CP) is nowadays on everyone's eye, whether due to its many promises or just some FOMO. Companies are now almost forced to consider CP frameworks when launching a new app or updating an older one. Developers with CP skills are also completely in demand.
Let’s get a little context and analyze this phenomena.
Principally, JavaScript's ubiquity, irrupts into backend development, and a robust open source movement have guided the language to a special situation in the development stack. Comprehensive multi - tier applications can only be developed using JavaScript, a proposal once unheard of.
It is also possible to see this trend towards cross - platform development in other languages. Apple, for instance, has open - sourced Swift, opening doors to indie developers who could really bring the language to other platforms and use it beyond the closed ecosystem of Apple.
Several existing languages, such as React, a JavaScript library for building Facebook - created user interfaces, or AngularJS, a Google web application framework, are used daily by big companies, startups, and autonomous developers to create mission - applications that are typified by speed, rapid development, and native user interfaces.
In just five months, Facebook demonstrated the benefits of these cross-platform development technologies by building their first native Android and iOS application with React
If that sounds crazy, wait until you hear of the NativeScript giant leap forward. A newer field entrant, NativeScript delivers on JavaScript's promise to develop true native mobile apps.
This runtime JS-based abstracts specific functionality of the platform into a unified set of libraries. Built using NativeScript, iOS and Android applications exemplify native performance and use the components of the native user interface that users know about. This last part is a differentiating factor best illustrated with some sample code for NativeScript:
<button text="some text" tap="some text" />
We’ve just created a button element. What is striking here is that this code will compile to a UIButton object in iOS and an android.widget.Button on Android.
These are genuine native controls and not WebView implementation. In addition, the native controls are exhaustively supported. The team of NativeScript was fancy to maintain parity with the underlying native APIs.
NativeScript will also support the off - the - box (currently beta) AngularJS frame. We will not only share code between web and mobile projects, but also make it significantly cheaper to bring an existing web app to a truly native experience.
The adoption of JavaScript is speeding up, and we do not anticipate that it will soon slow down.
Conclusions
We can watch this approach's rapid rise at the moment. More and more developers recognize the benefits of cross-platform applications, such as reduced time and cost of development, unified stacks of technology, etc. At the same time, development across platforms is no longer a compromise. Even with high loads and native-like UI, it is already capable of offering stable performance.
The adoption of JavaScript is speeding up, and we do not anticipate that it will soon slow down. Companies that standardize JavaScript are rewarded significantly by lower development costs, increased development resources and an affluent open source community.
There is a blurring line between web, mobile apps and consolidation of the technology to build them.
JavaScript is the king for now.