What Is Ionic ?

Ionic is open source framework used for developing mobile applications. It provides tools and services for building Mobile UI with native look and feel. This framework needs native wrapper to be able to run on mobile devices. This is an introductory tutorial, which covers the basics of the Ionic Open Source Framework and explains how to deal with its various components and sub-components.

Why did we build Ionic?

We built Ionic because we strongly believed that HTML5 would rule on mobile over time, exactly as it has on the desktop. Once desktop computers became powerful enough and browser technology had advanced enough, almost everyone was spending their computing time in the browser. And developers were overwhelmingly building web applications. With recent advancements in mobile technology, smartphones and tablets are now capable of running many of those same web applications.

We wanted to build an HTML5 mobile development framework that was focused on native or hybrid apps instead of mobile websites, since we felt there were great tools already for mobile website development. So Ionic apps aren’t meant to be run in a mobile browser app like Chrome or Safari, but rather the low-level browser shell like iOS’s UIWebView or Android’s WebView, which are wrapped by tools like Cordova/PhoneGap.

And above all, we wanted to make sure Ionic was as open source as possible, both by having a permissive open source license that could be used in both commercial and open source apps, but by cultivating a strong community around the project. We felt there were too many frameworks that were technically open source, but were not open source in spirit or were not possible to use in both closed source and open source projects without purchasing a commercial license.

Those familiar with web development will find the structure of an Ionic app straightforward. At its core, it’s just a web page running in an native app shell! That means we can use any kind of HTML, CSS, and Javascript we want. The only difference is, instead of creating a website that others will link to, we are building a self-contained application experience.

The bulk of an Ionic app will be written in HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Eager developers might also dig down into the native layer with custom Cordova plugins or native code, but it’s not necessary to get a great app.

Ionic also uses AngularJS for a lot of the core functionality of the framework. While you can still use Ionic with just the CSS portion, we recommend investing in Angular as it’s one of the best ways to build browser-based applications today.