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...

In simple terms, Cordova is the piece of software that stitches the web application and the native application together. The Apache Cordova website states that:

Apache Cordova does not just stitch the web app with the native app--but it also provides a set of APIs written in JavaScript to interact with the native features of the device. Yes, we can use JavaScript to access our camera, take a picture, and send it in an e-mail. Sounds exciting, right?

To get a better understanding of what is happening, let's take a look at the following screenshot:

As we can see, we have a WebView where the HTML/CSS/JS code gets executed. This code can be a simple standalone piece of user interface; at best we are making an AJAX request to get some data from a remote server. Or, this code can do much...

Ionic 2 is a beautiful, open source, frontend SDK for developing Hybrid Mobile apps with HTML5. Ionic provides mobile-optimized HTML, CSS, and JS components, as well as gestures and tools for building highly interactive apps.

Ionic 2 is performance efficient with its minimal DOM manipulation and hardware-accelerated transitions as compared to other frameworks in this league. Ionic uses Angular 2 as its JavaScript framework.

With the power of Angular inside a framework like Ionic 2, the possibilities are unlimited (we can use any Angular component inside Ionic as long as it makes sense in a mobile app). Ionic 2 has a very good integration with Cordova's device API. This means that we can access device APIs using Ionic Native and integrate it with the beautiful user interface components of Ionic.

Ionic has its own command-line interface (CLI) to scaffold, develop, and deploy Ionic apps. Before...

The latest version of Ionic at the time of this book's release is 3. I have put together another chapter named Ionic 3 (Chapter 11), to which you can refer to know more about Ionic 3 and its changes.

Also, please note that the examples in this book are still valid when working with Ionic 3 as well. There may be few syntactic and structural changes, but the overall gist should ideally remain the same.

Now we are going to set up all the required software needed to develop and run an Ionic app smoothly.

Since Ionic uses Node.js for its CLI as well as for the build tasks, we will first install it as follows:

1. Navigate to https://nodejs.org/.

Click on the Install button on the homepage and an installer for our OS will automatically be downloaded. We can also navigate to https://nodejs.org/download/ and download a specific copy.

2. Install Node.js by executing the downloaded installer.

To verify that Node.js has been successfully installed, open a new Terminal (*nix systems) or Command Prompt (Windows systems) and run the following command:

        node -v
        > v6.10.1

3. Now execute the following command:

      npm -v
     ...

Now that we are done with the software setup, we will scaffold a few Ionic apps.

Ionic has three main/go-to templates, using which we can quickly start developing apps:

• Blank: This is a blank Ionic project with one page
• Tabs: This is a sample app that is built using Ionic tabs
• Side menu: This is a sample app that is built to consume side menu driven navigation

To understand the basics of scaffolding, we will start with the blank template.

To keep our learning process clean, we will create a folder structure to work with Ionic projects. Create a folder named chapter2.

Next, open a new command prompt/terminal and change the directory (cd) to the chapter2 folder. Now run the following command:

ionic start -a "Example 1" -i app.example.one example1 blank --v2

The preceding command has the following features:

• -a "Example 1": This is the human-readable name of the app.
• -i app.example...

Before we proceed further, I would recommend setting up the developer tools in your browser in the following format.

Once the Ionic app is launched, open the developer tools by pressing Command + Option + I on Mac and Ctrl + Shift + I on Windows/Linux. Then click on the last but one icon in the top row, next to the close button, as seen in the following screenshot:

This will dock developer tools to the side of the current page. Drag the demarcation line between the browser and the developer tools until the view starts to resemble that of a mobile.

If you click on the Elements tab in the developer tools, you can easily inspect the page and see the output in one go, as shown in the following screenshot:

This view is...

So far, we have scaffolded a blank Ionic app and launched it in a browser. Now, we will walk through the scaffolded project structure.

If we open the chapter2 example1 folder in our text editor, we should see the following folder structure at the root of the project:

. 
├── config.xml 
├── hooks 
├── ionic.config.json 
├── node_modules 
├── package.json 
├── platforms 
├── plugins 
├── resources 
├── src 
├── tsconfig.json 
├── tslint.json 
├── www

Here is a quick explanation of each of the items:

• src: This is the folder where all the development happens. The app source code will be placed here. If you are coming from Ionic 1 to Ionic 2, this is the...

To get a good feel for the Ionic CLI and the project structure, we will scaffold the other two starter templates as well. First we will scaffold the tabs template.

Using the cd command, go back to the chapter2 folder and run the following command:

ionic start -a "Example 2" -i app.example.two example2 tabs --v2

The tabs project is scaffolded inside the example2 folder. Using the cd command, go to the example2 folder and execute the following command:

    ionic serve

We should see the tabbed interface app built using Ionic, as seen in the following screenshot:

The tabs are located at the bottom of the page. We will talk more about customizations in Chapter 3, Ionic Components and Navigation, and Chapter 4, Ionic Decorators and Services.

If you go back to the example2 folder and analyze the project structure, everything would be the same except for the contents of the src...

Now we will scaffold the final template. Using the cd command, go back to the chapter2 folder and run the following command:

ionic start -a "Example 3" -i app.example.three example3 sidemenu --v2

To execute the scaffolded project, using the cd command, go to the example3 folder and give the following command:

ionic serve

The output should be similar to the following screenshot:

You can analyze the project structure yourself and see the difference.

In this chapter, we gained some knowledge on Mobile Hybrid architecture. We have also learned how a hybrid app works. We saw how Cordova stitches the HTML, CSS, and JS code to be executed inside the WebView of a native app. Then we installed the required software to develop Ionic apps locally. We scaffolded a blank template using the Ionic CLI and analyzed the project structure. Later on, we scaffolded the other two templates and observed the difference.

In the next chapter, Ionic Components and Navigation, we will look at Ionic components and how to build a simple two page application and navigate between them. This will help us in building interesting user interfaces and multipage apps using the Ionic API.