Gone are the days when developing an app took multiple days and even weeks. Today, the world of mobile app development is filled with stunning open source front-end SDKs(Software Development Kits) and frameworks which have made it possible for the developer to build an awesome app within a few minutes. Ionic is one such HTML5 App Development Framework that allows you to create high-performing and extensively intuitive native-like mobile apps. If you’re new to Ionic and want to dig deeper into this most used and recommended framework, then get on with reading the paragraphs that are listed out in this post. Let’s get started!
The Ionic Framework – An Overview
As a powerful front-end framework built on Apache Cordova/PhoneGap, Ionic allows you to create a mobile app using the web technologies that you’re familiar with. Additionally, with Ionic, you can even opt for deploying your mobile apps using AngularJS. Created by the team which has already delivered successful projects like Codiqa and Jetstrap, Ionic is utmost capable of handling the entire look and feel along with the UI interactions that are required for your mobile app. Quite similar to “Bootstrap for Native”, Ionic is equipped with impressive support for a wide range of slick animations and native mobile components.
Serving both as a JavaScript UI library and a CSS framework, Ionic is best suited for developers who’re already familiar with AngularJS. The reason being that Ionic utilized a suite of AngularJS extensions through directives which allow you to equip your HTML5 apps with gestures, user interactions and exciting animations. Following a View Controller pattern, Ionic is pre-equipped with Controllers that enable you to handle UI interaction along with the view.
Live Demo
Ionic Framework – What all does it include?
Here’s a list of some of the key things that the Ionic Framework includes:
- Icon Pack – The Ionic framework comes with a good collection of icons that can be easily used within the mobile apps
- Automatic Transitions based on History – Ionic can automatically transition views towards the slide left and right on the basis of history
- UI Interaction Handling – You can use AngularJS expressions for handling the visibility and non-visibility of tab, when it is being clicked
- Gestures – Ionic comes with Hammer.js that offers an incredible gesture support for swipe, tap, drag, drop etc.
- A set of UI components – Ionic is loaded with brilliant UI components including modal, radio, tabs, navigation, action sheet, cards, headers, toggle, range, slide boxes etc.
- View Stacks/State Management – Ionic comes with built-in state management for different views. This feature allows you to keep a good track of the navigation history along with the flexibility to push multiple templates into a single app page.
- Customizable Theme – Ionic base theme is built with Sass. Hence, you can conveniently customize it to create a custom theme
- Pull to Refresh – Ionic allows you to add the ‘pull to refresh’ capability to the scroll area within the application
Knowing Ionic Framework’s Advantages
Here is a list of some noteworthy advantages of the Ionic Framework:
- Flexibility to package apps into different frameworks
Once you’re done with developing a hybrid app using Ionic, you can go ahead with packaging the app into a variety of frameworks, thereby saving you from the headache that’s associated with re-writing the code on a repetitive basis
- Default app-setups
Unlike a suite of HTML5 app development frameworks, Ionic comes with several pre-gererated app setups that can be utilized for getting started with the creation of an app layout instantly
- A developer-friendly documentation
In contrast to the lengthy and often boring documentation available with other HTML5 App development frameworks, Ionic comes with a developer-friendly documentation that isn’t boring and helps you to in using Ionic more easily
- Ionic comes with a small learning curve
Even a plain understanding of AngularJS can enable you to initiate the process of developing eye-catchy mobile apps using the Ionic framework. You need not get into the complexities of understanding any difficult programming language
- Easy to integrate with popular back-end technologies
One of the greatest advantages of the Ionic framework is that it can be easily hooked up to the most common and well-known back-end technologies like Ruby or Node.
Ionic Framework – Special emphasis on Markup and Presentation
People behind Ionic are confident enough that the innovative design patterns incorporated within the framework are beyond the boundaries of applauds. Plus, there is an additional flexibility of adding a custom CSS in addition to overriding the default properties. Although Ionic’s default design is quite similar to that of iOS, it’s quite easy to extend the CSS to get the look and feel you desire to have for your mobile app. With its core written using Sass, Ionic comes with tons of mixins and fully-customized variables that make it a powerful and robust HTML5 mobile app development framework.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to creating native apps using HTML5, nothing can beat the Ionic Framework. Hope by now, you’d have gathered an in-depth understanding of Ionic and its growing significance among the HTML5 app development community.
Example:
<html ng-app="ionicApp">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no">
<title>Ionic- A high-end framework for building native-looking HTML5 mobile apps</title>
<link href="http://code.ionicframework.com/nightly/css/ionic.css" rel="stylesheet">
<script src="http://code.ionicframework.com/nightly/js/ionic.bundle.js"></script>
<script>
angular.module('ionicApp', ['ionic'])
.controller('MyCtrl', function($scope) {
$scope.items = [
{ id: 1 },
{ id: 2 },
{ id: 3 },
{ id: 4 },
{ id: 5 }
];
});
</script>
</head>
<body ng-controller="MyCtrl">
<ion-header-bar class="bar-positive">
<h1 class="title">Ionic List Items</h1>
</ion-header-bar>
<ion-content>
<ion-list>
<ion-item ng-repeat="item in items" item="item">
List Item {{ item.id }}
</ion-item>
</ion-list>
</ion-content>
</body>
</html>
Output:
