Book Image

Learning Ionic, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Arvind Ravulavaru
Book Image

Learning Ionic, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Arvind Ravulavaru

Overview of this book

Ionic makes it incredibly easy to build beautiful and interactive mobile apps using HTML5, SCSS, and Angular. Ionic also makes app development easier, faster, and more fun. This hands-on guide will help you understand the Ionic framework and how you can leverage it to create amazing real-time applications. We begin by covering the essential features of Angular 2, and then dive straight into how Ionic fits in today’s world of hybrid app development and give you a better understanding of the mobile hybrid architecture along the way. Further on, you will learn how to work with Ionic decorators, services, and components, which will allow you to build complex apps using the Ionic framework. We will take a look at theming Ionic apps using the built-in SCSS setup. After that, we will explore Ionic Native, and you will learn how to integrate device-specific features, such as notifications, with the Ionic app. To complete our learning, we will be building a Rider app, using Ionic and Uber API, to book a ride. Next, you will learn how to unit test, end-to-end test, monkey test, and execute device testing on AWS Device farm. Then, we will take a look at migrating the existing Ionic 1 apps to Ionic 2 and deploy them to the App Store. The final chapter on Ionic 3 wraps up this book by explaining the new features of Ionic 3 at the time of writing this book. By the end of this book, you will be able to develop, deploy, and manage hybrid mobile applications built with Cordova, Ionic, and Angular. All the examples in this book are valid for both Ionic 2 and Ionic 3.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

What is new in Angular?

Angular 2 is one of the most anticipated and dramatic version upgrades I have seen for any software. Angular 1 was a boon to web/mobile web/hybrid app developers, where managing a lot of things was made easy. Not only did Angular 1 help restructure client-side app development, but it also provided a platform to build applications; not websites, but applications. Though the first release suffered performance issues when dealing with large datasets, the Angular team bounced back quite well with the later releases of Angular 1, that is, Angular 1.4.x and above, and fixed these performance issues by releasing a more stable version in the form of Angular (2).

Some of the new changes that have accompanied with Angular (2) are:

  • Speed and performance improvements.
  • Component based (not the typical MV*).
  • Angular CLI.
  • Simple and expressive syntax.
  • Progressive Web Apps (PWA).
  • Cross-platform app development, which includes desktops, mobile, and web.
  • Cordova-based Hybrid app development.
  • Angular Universal provider for the server side for fast initial views.
  • Upgrades to better animation, internationalization, and accessibility.
  • Angular can be written on ES5, ES6, TypeScript, and Dart are based on the user's comfort with the JavaScript flavor.

With these new updates, developing apps has never been easier, be it on the desktop, mobile, or Mobile Hybrid environments.

Note: The latest version of Angular is going to be called just Angular, not Angular 2, or AngularJS 4, or NG4. So throughout this book, I will refer to Angular version 2 as Angular.

The current latest version of Angular is 4. Do checkout Chapter 11, Ionic 3, to know a bit more about Angular 4 and how it improves Ionic.

You can find more information about Angular here: https://angular.io.

Note: If you are new to Angular, you can refer to these books:

https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/learning-angular-2

https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/mastering-angular-2-components

https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/mastering-angular-2

https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/angular-2-example

Or these videos:

https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/angular-2-projects-video

https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/web-development-angular-2-and-bootstrap-video

https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/angular-2-web-development-TypeScript-video