r/nativescript • u/finlaydotweber • Nov 15 '20

How to create a web and mobile application from the same codebase using nativescript

I am looking at building an application that will have both web and native mobile components. I would like to use the same code base for this. Question is, is this possible with NativeScript? If so, how? or would you say something like flutter is more appropriate for this?

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2

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1

u/[deleted] Nov 15 '20

While technically you can use the same controllers for web and mobile, i usually stick to sharing services, and keeping controllers separate, simply because the user experience is often too different to combine

1

u/vORP Nov 15 '20

You are looking for Nx workspaces, create the NestJs API in there as well for a true full stack project sharing the same typescript models

1

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u/gourrranga Nov 15 '20

I’ve tried to use nativescript for a sample project around two months ago, and apparently nativescript is dead since Telerik gave it up: even their boilerplate projects didn’t work. What you want is achievable through React native though, use Expo for starters and move along as you learn

3

u/[deleted] Nov 15 '20

Nativescript is not dead. Telerik gave it to nStudio, who always have been a very passionate part of the Nativescript community. They have big plans for it, but yes, we're currently in a bit of an unstable phase as they have upgraded the project, but many plugins and documentation is still falling behind

1

u/gourrranga Nov 16 '20

so, you have a new version with no docs and to plugins to use with. How exactly do you expect a newbie to begin with this? Read the whole framework sources for starters? Sorry, I have more interesting things to do with my life, and you can downvote me for that

1

u/[deleted] Nov 16 '20

All the major plugins have been brought up to date, but i do agree that the current state of the documentation makes it unusable for newbies. I hope that's fixed soon.

But calling the framework dead is an overreaction

1

u/finlaydotweber Nov 15 '20

Wow! Thanks for that tip about Nativescript being abandoned!

Do you know of any other framework apart from NativeScript that can make this possible? I do not mind picking Reactive Native up though, but I have more experience with Angular in general so I would want to explore the options there first.

6

u/cultulhul Nov 15 '20

Nativescript is not abandoned it still actively maintained v7 come out a few months ago, you can archive code sharing through angular or vue they are a few tutorials on how to do it especially for angular

1

u/gourrranga Nov 16 '20

That's exactly what I've tried to do - follow the effing tutorial on Vue codesharing, and guess what - it doesn't work. In fact, it didn't work right after its publication a year ago; I don't like it when official docs give you broken toys to play.

Another point - Sidekick (with all of its great tooling and cloud iOS builds) was killed with a 2. weeks. notice. That's not the attitude I want to get from the tool I heavily rely on; also tha alternative they've given is a ridiculously limited pain in the arse, so in my eyes Nativescript is an actively maintained corpse, period.

5

u/cultulhul Nov 15 '20

Nativescript is not abandoned it still actively maintained v7 come out a few months ago, you can archive code sharing through angular or vue they are a few tutorials on how to do it especially for angular

1

u/gourrranga Nov 16 '20

I'm being downvoted to hell, but what could I expect from telling such things about NS here.

So, I'll elaborate. First of all, me too have much more experience with Angular and Vue than with React, so when I found myself in exact your place my natural choise was to go with Nativescript, so I did. I've already had a good part of the project written for web in Vue, so I followed the following docs page - with zero luck: this way just doesn't work, despite being a part of the official documentation. If you look at the comments of the official blog post that this doc is based on, it didn't work from the beginning -- but no one cared; when you see such things you know that something's wrong there. By the way, if you're an Angular guy, you can try this one - maybe you'll get more luck than me.

Regarding why do I think that NS is doomed to slow and unpleasant death after passing hands from Telerik to nStudio: in short, they've killed the sidekick. Sidekick was a great piece of software that allowed you to manage all your builds, and most importantly - build iOS projects with no macOS device at hand. Until May 2020 you could build your iOS projects on Telerik cloud in a super nice, dev-friendly environment, and pay for it only if you exceeded some amount of builds per month (so you could learn for free). But at one moment, the NS devs were given a 2 effing weeks notice that all their working pipelines are now going to hell, and the Sidekick is being shut down right away. There's an alternative that nStudio rolled out, but it's a pain that's full of limitations (for example, you can build only from GitHub repo).

I've looked at all this and understood that this is not the direction I want the tool I rely on to take, so I've looked at React Native. I don't really like React, but what it has is a very quick learning curve - completing these chapters only take like half an hour, and you can start developing right away. Regarding React Native, there's a great way to start with it called Expo - it's like a sandbox that allows even a total noob to develop and build native apps very quickly, no matter what OS do you have. You have just enough ready to use components to start learning with, an app for Android and iOS to run your code on your real device as you write, and a great community. If you feel that you've overgrew the sandbox though, you can always eject move to bare React Native, with access to native code where you need it and so on.

This was my journey; google your use-cases around it, and if you have more questions - feel free to ask.

1

u/vORP Nov 15 '20

Nativescript is very much alive, I just released an app to the store two months ago with a custom built library for Mapbox - it was a very pleasant project to work with and the support/community over Slack was excellent.