Hybrid Mobile Apps have become a promising choice in mobile app development to achieve cost effectiveness and rapid development. Ionic has been instrumental in setting the benchmark in this space as it focuses on performance. 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 practical knowledge required to use modern web technologies in building amazing Hybrid Mobile Apps using Ionic. This fast-paced, practical book explains all the important concepts of AngularJS and Cordova framework required to develop Ionic apps. Then, it gives you a brief introduction to Hybrid Mobile Applications. It will guide you through setting up the development environment for different mobile platforms 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 use Ionic cloud services to empower your mobile apps.
Chapter 1, All About Hybrid Mobile Apps and Ionic Framework, covers the introduction to Hybrid Mobile Applications and the technologies used to develop these apps. This chapter will also include all important concepts regarding AngularJS and Apache Cordova, which readers need to know before building Ionic apps.
Chapter 2, Setting up the Environment the Right Way, covers setting up the native development environments for required platforms and then installing Ionic and required dependencies to start building Ionic apps. It will include details about Ionic command-line interface and the important features it provides for rapid development.
Chapter 3, Start Building Your First Ionic App, includes instructions for starting a new project and leveraging Ionic starter templates to bootstrap easily. It also covers the explanation about the design of the app structure and how you can plan to develop your app on top of it.
Chapter 4, Navigation and Routing in an Ionic App, covers how to create routes and layouts for navigation. It will teach the reader about views, Ionic header/footer sections, and different layout components, such as tabs, side menu, and modals. It also includes the basic routes and navigation setup for our sample app.
Chapter 5, Accessorizing Your App with Ionic Components, covers different components, which will be used in building the mobile app. It has two major categories: one is CSS components, which include grid framework and some reusable CSS classes to be used to design UI. The other category is Javascript components, which will facilitate building the business logic and UI interactions for the app.
Chapter 6, Integrating App with Backend Services, includes explanation about creating Ionic services and factories, which will interact with backend services. Ionic Apps can be integrated with all kinds of web services, REST APIs, SOAP services, and even cloud-based mBaaS (Mobile Backend as a Services) such as Parse and Firebase.
Chapter 7, Testing App on Real Devices, covers tools and techniques used to test and debug the app on your actual devices.
Chapter 8, Working with Cordova Plugins - ngCordova, teaches the reader how to use ready-made Cordova plugins, which help the mobile app to talk to native device APIs, such as sensors, camera, and geolocation. It will also explain how to integrate an open source Angular wrapper named ngCordova for cordova plugins into an Ionic App.
Chapter 9, Future of Ionic, includes an introduction to various cloud Ionic services available online under the Ionic.io platform. It also covers about the future of Ionic v2 along with Angular v2 talking about new features and migration path.
For this book, you require a system with Windows, Mac, or Linux OS. You need to install NodeJS and NPM to manage dependencies for different projects. This book will guide you through the setup for mobile app development platforms for iOS and Android. Test devices having Android and iOS would be required to test the mobile apps.
This book is ideal for any web developer who wants to enter into the world of mobile app development but has no clue where to start. Ionic is an ideal starting point and provides a smooth learning curve to help you build Hybrid Apps using web technologies and to develop native apps for iOS and Android; you do not need to know multiple languages. This book will also be useful for Hybrid App developers who have not found the perfect framework to ensure that users get a rich experience from your apps.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, code tags, user input, and Twitter handles are shown in bold.
A block of code is set as follows:
<ion-nav-bar class="bar-stable"> <ion-nav-back-button> </ion-nav-back-button> </ion-nav-bar> <ion-nav-view></ion-nav-view>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<ion-nav-bar class="bar-stable">
<ion-nav-back-button>
</ion-nav-back-button>
</ion-nav-bar>
<ion-nav-view></ion-nav-view>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ ionic start MenuDemo sidemenu
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In order to run an app on an Android device, enable Developer Options and check the USB Debugging option from the settings."
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The example codes available on the website are taken from Ionic Projects. In order to run them successfully on your machines, you need to create an empty Ionic Project and then copy the example code files to the www folder of your Ionic Project and then run npm install first and then ionic serve command to run locally or ionic run [android|ios] to run on the device.
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