Re:NativeScript – Cross-platform framework for building nati...
by city41 on Friday June 13, 2014 @04:06PM
(#7890591)
I think it's doing both. Exposing native APIs for non UI related APIs, and providing an abstract UI layer that works across all devices. The article says: "Cross Platform UI abstractions - available will be full UI abstraction to build the application UI. All the UI code will be shared - you do not need prior Android, iOS or Windows knowledge."
This project exposes the native platform APIs to a JavaScript VM running on the device. It does not try to build cross-platform widgets as far as I can tell. This is generally a good idea.
It's much better than WebView and friends because the DOM will always be slow and not have native-feeling interactions unless W3C decides to break backwards compatibility (they won't).
It's also much better than trying to do a "write-once-run-anywhere" cross-platform widget library because those solutions never feel like the target platform either (see Swing vs SWT)
This approach lets you teach your team one language and one set of idioms and then implement across different platforms. While I have some beefs with the details of the implementation it appears to me to be a winning strategy.
BTW: I don't work for Telerik and know nothing about them.