As a software developer, and one that works with mobile applications (or someone interested in learning how to), you may have heard about Ionic. Today we are going to discuss Ionic framework, tell you why we teach it and love it here at our SoftStack Factory Code Camp and why you may want to use it!
Ionic is one of the frameworks that is a part of our curriculum here at Softstack Factory, we are actually proud to be one of the only coding bootcamps that focuses on this awesome tool. Ionic is an HTML5 mobile applications development framework, it is free, open source and relatively new, the DriftyCo crew has been working on it for 2 years. It uses the existing HTML5 and CSS3 capabilities to deliver fast experiences and is focused mainly on the look and feel, and UI interaction of the app. One of the things that makes it so good is that it is not just another UI framework, Ionic is targeted at building hybrid mobile apps, which has many benefits over pure native apps, specifically in terms of platform support, speed of development, and access to 3rd party code.
Ionic is built on top of AngularJS framework from Google and utilizes it to provide the application structure, while Ionic itself is focused on the user interface. Ionic provides the connection between the power of Angular and the beauty of Ionic UI components and offers simpler building blocks that can be combined to deliver rich user interfaces.It also comes with handy variables and mixins to extend the customized appearance and it’s packaged with its own open source icon library featuring over 440 icons to chose from.
All the functionalities that can be found in native mobile development SDKs are provided by Ionic. The apps can be built and customize for Android or iOS, and deploy through Cordova to allow it to run on your device. As we said before, Ionic is not just another just another UI framework it is a complete ecosystem that helps you develop and build great Software.
SSF is one of the only Code Camps that teach Ionic to its students, and we do so because we believe that this tool and the complementary technologies provide a comprehensive set of knowledge needed to enhance their future as a software developer. “One of the biggest reasons we choose to use Ionic was that mobile is big and our students get to learn web technologies that are in great demand. This provides them two in high demand skillsets.” Says Harold Gottschalk, SoftStack Factory CEO.
Ionic is not focused on the development of desktop applications, it has some limitations but can be used to deliver the application within the browser. Ionic and it’s platform is focused on delivering hybrid mobile apps that run natively on (Android, iOS, Windows phone, Chrome and even Apple Watch) using Cordova. Ionic platform in itself is amazing and we talk about it in another post.
Check out some beautiful apps built with Ionic!