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)

Angular - A Primer

When Sir Timothy Berners-Lee invented the Internet, he never anticipated that the Internet would be used to publish selfies, share cat videos, or bomb web page with ads. His main intention (guessing) was to create a web of documents so a user on the Internet can access these hypertexts from anywhere and make use of it.

An interesting article published by Craig Buckler at Sitepoint titled, The Web Runs Out of Disk Space (http://www.sitepoint.com/web-runs-disk-space/), shows how the content on the Internet is spread out:

  • 28.65% pictures of cats
  • 16.80% vain selfies
  • 14.82% pointless social media chatter
  • 12.73% inane vlogger videos
  • 9.76% advertising/clickbait pages
  • 8.70% scams and cons
  • 4.79% articles soliciting spurious statistics
  • 3.79% new JavaScript tools/libraries
  • 0.76% documents for the betterment of human knowledge

You can see, since the invention of the Internet to the present day, how we have evolved. Better evolution needs better frameworks to build and manage such apps that need to be scalable, maintainable, and testable. This is where Angular stepped in back in 2010 to fill the gap and it has been evolving quite well since then.

We are going to start our journey by understanding the new changes to Angular, the importance of TypeScript, and see how Ionic 2 has adapted itself with Angular to help build performance-efficient and modern Mobile Hybrid apps.

In this chapter, we will take a quick peek at new topics added as part of Angular with the help of an example. The main changes that have taken place in Angular (2) are primarily on the lines of performance and componentization, apart from the language update. We will be going through the following topics in this chapter:

  • What is new in Angular?
  • TypeScript and Angular
  • Building a Giphy app