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

Introduction to Cordova plugins


Cordova's main purpose is to package web code into a Native App, but the second most important job is to create a bridge between the web(JS) code and the native code. Cordova ensures that Hybrid Apps harness the power and performance of native code perfectly. Cordova plugins utilize this power and enable us to use the specific device features in JS easily.

Cordova from version 3 and above decided to expose all device APIs as plugins. The Cordova plugin is a reusable set of code that contains the native code as well as JavaScript code. We know that our web app runs inside a WebView control in Ionic/Cordova Apps. The JavaScript code of the plugin exposes methods that will call a bridge/interface to invoke a native method for the respective platform such as iOS(Objective C) and Android(Java).

The contents of a Cordova plugin package are:

  • Native code for each platform

  • A common JavaScript library

  • A manifest file called plugin.xml

The folder structure for the Cordova...