Ionic has been evolving a lot over the years; ever since Ionic v1 has launched there has been continuous development and improvement going on with the framework. One of the smartest moves was to launch Ionic v2, which is based on Angular 2 by the Ionic team. Recently, Ionic 3 was launched, which is based on Angular 4 and TypeScript 2.2. Here in this book we will mainly be going through Ionic 2 and 3 and their advanced concepts. We will cover topics such as building an e-commerce app with Bluetooth beacons support for malls, integration with Firebase, and PWA support with Ionic applications. We will start with support for all three platforms: iOS, Android, and Windows, and will be demonstrating applications based on Internet of Things, which will be really exciting.
In this chapter, we will be going through all the essentials of Ionic, which will help to build large scale and enterprise grade applications. We have been working on Ionic 1x for the last 2-3 years and during that journey we have seen so much improvement in the framework and multiple features developed. After Angular 2 was released, a lot more improvement came in the framework and then the Ionic team planned on developing Ionic 2, which is based on Angular 2. Ionic 3 and Angular 4 are on similar lines and do not have major framework changes such as we had when we shifted from Ionic v1 to v2. With Ionic 3 you will now see improved performance, reduced code complexity, and the ability to build scalable applications has increased. Ionic is now targeting mobile web and desktop applications, which helps developers running same codebase everywhere. Ionic Native is another example of how the Ionic team is improving the product day by day and making developers' lives easier. We will initially look into some of the basics of Angular and Ionic, also how TypeScript can be a big asset for building enterprise applications. Ionic CLI and Ionic Cloud products are as well as improving regularly, which we can use to speed up our development time and efficiently test or share our applications. In this chapter, we will cover:
- Angular 4, Ionic 3, and TypeScript
- Installation and setup
- Directory structure and modularity
- Theming with SASS
- Ionic CLI
