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

Ionic development environment


Ionic Framework is based on Apache Cordova, which takes care of build and plugin management. Apache Cordova CLI uses the NodeJS package manager called NPM for dependency management.

Installing NodeJS

NodeJS is a JavaScript-based server-side environment to build backend systems. NodeJS has an efficient package manager that takes care of installing and maintaining a central repository of packages, version management, and dependency management. NPM has become the default dependency manager for a lot of other frameworks apart from NodeJS. Ionic Framework also leveraged this successful package manager so we have to install it for Hybrid App development.

In order to install NodeJS, download the binary for the respective OS—Windows, Linux, or Mac OS from https://nodejs.org/download/.

On a Mac or Linux, you can use a package manager such as brew to install NodeJS:

$ brew install node

After the node installation is complete, please type in the following commands to test...