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All You Need to Know About Ionic

What is Ionic?

First Launched in 2013, Ionic is an open-source Software Development Kit (SDK) framework great for developing hybrid mobile applications. As of now, there are over 5 Million mobile applications developed using Ionic. Through a library of native components, Ionic offers platform-specific UI elements for Android and iOS. 

This framework allows you to develop applications utilizing programming languages and web applications such as Angular, TypeScript, CSS, HTML, and Javascript. It supports various plugins to speed up development. It helps developers design simple, interactive, and intuitive applications by providing many customizable themes and components. Ionic also supports various plugins, which makes your applications future-proof and scalable. You can add as many features as you want on Ionic, thereby, making this SDK platform ideal for building complex applications.

What are the Benefits of Ionic?

  1. Utilizes a Single Codebase: The Ionic Framework makes use of popular technologies such as Javascript, Angular Js, and CSS for developing applications. Anyone who has experience with Angular or web technologies can create fully functional applications by forming a single codebase for all the platforms. With native app development, one may have to rewrite the code based on the platform and this process is extremely time-consuming and expensive. However, with Ionic’s reusable components developers have the flexibility of developing cross-platform applications.
  1. Easy to Learn and Has a Strong Community: As the Ionic framework is based on JavaScript, CSS, and Angular JS, it is easy to learn for programmers and front-end developers who have been experts in these technologies beforehand. Companies will never face any difficulty in finding front-end developers who can work with Ionic as developers can easily grasp the basics of this platform. As Ionic is a common framework that has been around for years, it has an active and strong community backing it. Ionic developers offer support to new developers through Twitter, GitHub, Slack, and the Ionic forum. This community will keep growing as the Ionic framework over the years has been made more accessible to developers.
  1. Makes Testing Easy: Testing Ionic applications is easy and convenient as these applications function through a WebView and can be tested through any device’s browser. Developers and testers do not need to invest in an additional testing device to check the app’s functionality while utilizing Ionic, as there are built-in debugging and testing tools provided by the browsers. If you want to test the Angular components of your application specifically you can use Angular CLI. Whereas for testing the web components the Ionic CLI is more effective. 

What are the Limitations of Ionic?

  1. No Hot Reloading Feature: The hot reloading is a basic and essential feature used to make changes in the applications’ code. This feature enables developers to modify their code without having to reload the entire application. Though the code file will be refreshed, the application will continue working and running the changes made simultaneously, while it’s live. Ionic uses live reloading instead of hot reloading, wherein the entire application is refreshed to implement the changes made. In other words, whenever developers want to modify the application the whole application will get restarted and this slows down the speed of application development. Having a hot reloading feature would have made Ionic a convenient platform for modifying code.
  1. Has Security Issues: Security is always an issue while developing hybrid applications. Before version 4 was released, the Ionic CLI did not offer built-in code uglification which would have to make code tough to read for hackers. Developers had to uglify the code manually before version 4 was launched. There can be many security breaches on your hybrid mobile application or Progressive Web Developers developed using Ionic as these applications are essentially run on the device like a website. It is important to take additional security measures while using Ionic such as preferring an HTTPS connection over HTTP to communicate with the backend.
  1. Dependent on Plugins: To access native functionality, developers need to use Plugins while building applications with Ionic.  There are many ready-made and easy-to-find plugins that can be used for getting the required functionality on Ionic. However, there may be situations in which finding a module or a plugin can be extremely difficult. If you want a specific feature you may have to create a new plugin. This created additional work for developers and can make the development process time-consuming and not very cost-efficient.

Ionic is one of the best SDKs for developing applications across platforms. Development teams well-acquainted with JavaScript the AngularJs Framework can create high-performing mobile applications using Ionic. As opposed to other native app development approaches, Ionic is a comprehensive technology that allows you to build web and mobile apps much faster. Ionic comes with many features catering to different platforms and can help your team save time, resources, costs, and efforts required for developing applications.

Author Bio:

Poorvee Kalyani Alla is a mass communication graduate, copywriter, and an avid blogger who writes on technical and lifestyle-related topics for West Agile Labs, Exegy Consulting, Jewellerista, etc.