Book Image

Getting Started with Ionic

By : Rahat Khanna
Book Image

Getting Started with Ionic

By: Rahat Khanna

Overview of this book

Hybrid Apps are a promising choice in mobile app development to achieve cost effectiveness and rapid development. However, they were not preferred over native apps until few years back due to a poor performance and bad user experience, but everything has changed with the release of Ionic. It has evolved as the most popular choice for Hybrid Mobile App development as it tends to match the native experience and provides robust components/tools to build apps. Getting Started with Ionic equips any web developer with the basic knowledge needed to use modern web technologies to build amazing hybrid mobile apps using Ionic. This fast-paced, practical book explains all the important concepts of AngularJS and Cordova Framework required to develop apps, then gives you a brief introduction to hybrid mobile applications. It will guide you through setting up the environment to develop mobile apps, and through the multiple options and features available in Ionic so you can use them in your mobile apps. Features such as the Side Menu, Tabs, Touch Interactions, and native features such as Bar Code, Camera, and Geolocations are all covered.. Finally, we’ll show you how to use Cordova plugins and publish your apps.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Getting Started with Ionic
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Why use Apache Cordova?


Apache Cordova is a WebView-based Hybrid App development framework used to build cross-platform Native Apps. It is one of the most popular frameworks that has been open sourced by Adobe and is maintained by the Apache Foundation. Adobe maintains another branch with added features named Phonegap. They also have a cloud-based service called Phonegap Build (http://build.phonegap.com), which generates the native builds on the fly so that you do not need to install native SDKs.

It follows the same architecture discussed previously, having a minimal core and ability to add plugins for extra functionality to your app. Apache Cordova has a high number of open source plugins that provide excellent capability to Hybrid Apps. Any developer can also create a custom plugin to expose unique native functionality in a Hybrid App. It also consists of a CLI interface to provide commands for managing plugins and automating builds for multiple platforms. Apache Cordova is a widely tested and accepted framework and is recommended for building Hybrid Mobile Apps from web content.