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)

Mobile Hybrid architecture

Before we start working with Ionic, we need to understand the bigger picture of Mobile Hybrid development.

The concept is pretty simple. Almost every mobile operating system (also called platform, when working with Cordova) has an API to develop apps. This API consists of a component named WebView. A WebView is typically a browser that runs inside the scope of a mobile application. This browser runs the HTML, CSS, and JS code. This means that we can build a web page using the preceding technologies and then execute it inside our app.

We can use the same knowledge of web development to build native-hybrid mobile apps (here, native refers to installing the platform-specific format file on the device after it has been packaged along with the assets), for instance:

  • Android uses Android Application Package (.apk)
  • iOS uses iPhone Application Archive (.ipa)
  • Windows Phone uses Application Package...