Building the chat app

One of our primary concerns when developing mobile experiences is creating an interface that is intuitive for users to use. Fortunately, Ionic comes loaded with some very convenient features to make this possible. Before we get there though, let's set up the basics.

Setting up the basic app structure

Let's start by creating a basic app. Create a suitable project folder, which is different from that of the chat server that we created earlier. Navigate to the folder, open a terminal/command line, and run the following:

ionic start ionic-chat-app blank

As we have seen before, this will create an empty Ionic project for us to fill with love and good things. Have a look around. Not much to see here, right? We will change that soon enough. Hang tight.

It's early, but let's get our Ionic preview server going right away so that we can see the app live. Without changing anything, run the following from your terminal / command line:

ionic serve -l

This will bring...