Difference between Xamarin and Telerik's native script

Solution 1:

[Disclaimer: I work for Telerik.]

Telerik NativeScript and Xamarin are solving similar problems in different ways. Both frameworks are focused on enabling developers to create cross-platform mobile applications with native UI and shared, common code across all platforms.

For NativeScript, we're focused heavily on the web developer skill set. We want anyone that is comfortable today writing HTML/CSS/JavaScript to feel instantly at home creating native apps using NativeScript.

The only thing that is a little different is that views are defined in an XML-based markup. This markup is parsed by NativeScript and rendered as native UI on all target platforms. (NativeScript modules encapsulate the platform-specific renderings.)

The capability you highlight is also something unique to NativeScript's approach for exposing underlying native platform APIs. NativeScript effectively uses (build-time) reflection to make ANY native API available to the JavaScript proxy. That includes 3rd party native libraries. You do not depend on Telerik (or the open source community) to update NativeScript to take advantage of these new APIs. You simply execute a command and auto-discover the new APIs.

Of course, we don't expect a lot of people to write against the raw native APIs using JavaScript, so that's where modules again help encapsulate the different native APIs and expose a single, clean, cross-platform JavaScript API. Anyone can create NativeScript modules.

There's a great post that explains how all of this works in much more detail on the Telerik Developer Network (TDN): http://developer.telerik.com/featured/nativescript-works/

Hope this helps. NativeScript's public beta will be available this week, and v1 will ship in May.

UPDATE [Feb 2016] Since this was originally posted, NativeScript has shipped and is now in v1.6. It is also now integrating heavily with Angular 2. You can track the project progress on GitHub: https://github.com/NativeScript/NativeScript

UPDATE [June 2016] There are now performance metrics comparing NativeScript and Xamarin. Please find them here: https://github.com/NativeScript/sample-iOS-Profiling/tree/performance-tests