Last week saw the first meetup of the Belfast Ionic group. Hosted at Farset Labs – Tim Proctor and Rob Sinton of Teepee gave two sessions. The first was in essence the evolution of Ionic and the challenges and developments that lead to where Ionic is at present. The role of Ionic and Cordova in cross platform native app production and its interaction with Angular were covered and the pros and cons of the framework were outlined.
The use of Angular 2 to extend html with new tags , being built on javascript and ready for large scale application development of fast and fluid mobile apps was presented. The addition of Typescript (and its support in Visual Studio Code) and the built in nature of Sass were mentioned along with the tool used to generate the apps.
Ionic 2 improvements including DOM manipulation, web animation API and built in native scrolling were highlighted and Progressive web applications got a mention alongside AOT (Ahead of Time compilation), Ionic 3 was signalled as an indicator of progress for the framework providing as it does improved boot time and faster command line interface.
The various elements of Ionic such as Creator, View, and Cloud finished off the first section before Rob took us on a trip through the practical steps to get an Ionic app working before tailoring various elements of it to show the changes in the various “emulators” presented in Lab mode. In covering the elements of the app development through the Visual Studio Code ide (mentioned for its typescript support) the other requirements such as splash screen and icons/images of varying sizes to support the application on various form factors and resolutions were touched upon.
I have to say that the two sessions left me with so many future questions that hopefully there should be no shortage of topics in future meetups. The meetup was generously sponsored by MCSGroup Jobs Agency and it was interesting to hear the interest in the job market for Ionic developers. I hope that the next meetup is not too far away for another instalment of Bionic Ionic