NativeScript 2.2 has been released with upgraded UI, and Webpack for the Angular 2 based projects.

In the announcement's accompanying blog post, Valio Stoychev of Telerik details updates for components including Data Form (now in Beta), Chart (now out of Beta), SideDrawer and AppFeedback.

Calling Data Form both powerful and time saving, Stoychev says it will allows developers "to quickly build various fill-in forms such as: registration, data entry, login, etc. The control displays the properties of a data object in a list form. The end-user can then edit these properties using different types of editors."

Stoychev described the updates to the Chart component, saying:

The Chart component gets rid of its Beta tag to offer enhanced and smoother experience. It offers a large collection of different chart series - Line, Area, Spline Area, Bar, Pie and more. Combined with the categorical, date-time, numerical axes and with the line and band annotations, the Chart becomes a powerful visualization tool suitable for every data scenario. The underlying Angular 2 framework is still in RC, so there could be some changes in future, if necessary.

NativeScript's latest major release brings a raft of tooling updates, including the decision to use Webpack for the Angular 2 based projects. Stoychev says that with Webpack is already used by default in Angular 2 projects, and it is quickly becoming "a de-facto standard for any web developer." NativeScript will use Webpack as a "hot-reload mechanism," as well as bundling and optimising application size, and reducing loading time.

The introduction of Webpack is not immediate, however, and LiveSync will continue to be supported. In defence of the existing mechanism, Stoychev says that LiveSync has been improved, including less than one second between changes code editor and the application.

A preview of LiveSync 2.3 can be viewed below.

The NativeScript team is actively working towards enabling developers to run JavaScript code in a background thread, using the Web Workers Specification, Stoychev says. This follows the ability to use NativeScript to run background services in both Android and iOS. In the new release, iOS developers using NativeScript are also able to use the new APIs of the recently-released iOS10 beta.

Work continues to enable Angular 2.0 work on top of NativeScript. With NativeScript's 2.2 release, the RC4 release is officially supported and Stoychev says the team is making changes to comply with the latest RC5 release.

The full changelog can be found here, and among NativeScript's fixed features in 2.2 are:

Refactor application of text decoration, text transform, letter spacing and formatted text

CSS background-image on Label not loading in iOS

Multiple HTTP response headers not returned correctly on Android

App crash when editing text and text-view is removed

Multiple ScrollViews on one page fires scrollEvent simultaneously

iOS onSuspend + showModal() returning "Error: This value is not a native object"

The navigation bar duplicates when going to TabView's "More" tab

NativeScript is open source and released under the Apache 2.0 license. To upgrade to the latest version, developers should visit http://docs.nativescript.org/releases/upgrade-instructions.