JUniversal vs NativeScript: What are the differences?
What is JUniversal? A new, Java-based approach to cross-platform mobile apps (used by Google Inbox and Google Spreadsheets). The vision of JUniversal came from some guys at Nokia who possess considerable expertise both in Java and in building cross-platform apps. They built this tool to provide an elegant way to translate source code and make it useful across multiple platforms. JUniversal offers you the freedom to write your shared code in Java and then translate it to C# (available now) or to C++/Objective C++ (coming soon). You can also combine JUniversal with Google’s j2objc translator to translate Java to Objective-C for iOS.
What is NativeScript? Build truly native apps with JavaScript. NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.
JUniversal and NativeScript can be primarily classified as "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" tools.
Some of the features offered by JUniversal are:
- OAuth (based on Scribe)
- JSON
- Unit testing (JUnit)
On the other hand, NativeScript provides the following key features:
- 100% Access to Native Platform API
- NativeScript is free of charge as an open source project
- Code with JavaScript. Style with CSS
JUniversal and NativeScript are both open source tools. It seems that NativeScript with 17.2K GitHub stars and 1.27K forks on GitHub has more adoption than JUniversal with 132 GitHub stars and 22 GitHub forks.