This chapter provides basic information about the Ionic framework and how to get started using it. When creating a hybrid mobile application, we often have a problem dealing with the UI component. We want our hybrid app UI to look like a native app. Instead of creating CSS for styling from scratch, it would be easier and faster to use a framework that provides the UI component.

The Ionic framework is an HTML5 framework. It not only provides a native-looking UI component, but also powerful JavaScript framework via Angular JS. The Ionic framework gives a lot of Angular JS directives to make building a hybrid application easier and faster.

The Ionic framework works well with Cordova and PhoneGap. In fact, the Ionic framework command-line interface (CLI) depends on Cordova CLI to work. Ionic framework provides an easy way to interact with the Cordova plugin by using Cordova.