Differences between Native Script and react native and ionic framework

Question

Both Native Script and ionic framework are used for build IOS and Android apps with web view & without web views respectively.

I have a confusion between the concept of web view and without web view in above technologies.

What are the key difference between Native Script and ionic framework. Which one gives best performance ?

Can any one explain this or provide some related stuff.

(Please correct me if my understanding is wrong)

Answer 1

Nativescript (similar to React-Native) allows you to develop a mobile application in Javascript and XML (or JSX). These frameworks allow you to generate a native mobile application. The UI uses native components from the platform to create a performant slick interface. The Javascript logic code runs inside a JS engine (V8 for Android) bundled with the application. This has the downside of making the app pretty large but you can make cross platform, highly performant mobile apps. The JS code can also access phone functionality through bridging code in the framework.

PhoneGap/Cordova hybrid apps are web apps that get installed onto the phone like a native app but they run inside a WebView. Cordova is used to access the phone hardware functionality. The UI is not native it's just a web page so you can get performance issues (especially on older phones) and graphical stutters if your app is complex.

Ionic2 is probably the best example of a hybrid framework and it goes a long way to overcome the performance issues but it can be a struggle to get good examples/tutorials for it since it is very new and breaks a lot of stuff from Ionic1. Searching for examples brings up a lot of code that no longer works. Hybrid apps will often look similar on all platforms since they do not use native UI components. Some people prefer iPhone apps to look like iPhone apps and not a web app.

Answer 2

I have worked on both react native and native script and developed some of the application on both during a span of 8 months.Ionic is something I have to try.So I would share my experience using react native and nativescript.

There are both pros and cons with react native and nativescript.It depends on the user requirement of the application on which mainly your choice is made.

For example: When I had the application that was to be build more targeted towards the iOS and had basically required the view rendering to be fast and not that much of data handling I went for the react native.

On the other hand application was to be firs build for android and than for iOS, I opted for native script because it has better support for android as compared to react native.The main advantage you can take with nativescript is of the angular-2 data binding approach which lessen ups the work that is not there in react native.

The community of react native is very huge than nativescript and its growing at a better pace, but I found community of native script more helpful.

Here is the general description of all taken from there respective official site

REACT NATIVE

React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It uses the same design as React, letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.With React Native, you don't build a “mobile web app”, an “HTML5 app”, or a “hybrid app”. You build a real mobile app that's indistinguishable from an app built using Objective-C or Java. React Native uses the same fundamental UI building blocks as regular iOS and Android apps. You just put those building blocks together using JavaScript and React.

NATIVESCRIPT

NativeScript is how you build cross-platform, native iOS and Android apps without web views. Use Angular, TypeScript or modern JavaScript to get truly native UI and performance while sharing skills and code with the web. Get 100% access to native APIs via JavaScript and reuse of packages from NPM, CocoaPods and Gradle. Open source and backed by Telerik.

IONIC

Ionic framework is an open-source SDK for developing mobile apps. As it is based on AngularJS and Apache Cordova, Ionic enables building hybrid apps rather than separate ones for iOS and Android.It has fairly good documentation and tutorials. Also just knowing basic Javascript and HTML will get you started.