Ionic
Ionic uses HTML5 programming language and is widely preferred for mobile app development. It combines HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript to build native based apps and create their UI functionalities with ease. This mobile app development technology works on iOS’s UIWebView or Android’s WebView.
The Pros & Cons of Developing with Ionic
Mobile application development is one of the most exciting sects of the technology industry, and development options are being elevated everyday.
These new advancements allow developers to build stronger applications, and give users access powerful tools for collaboration, planning, or entertainment. One of the most recent advancements in mobile application development is the introduction of the Ionic framework.
What is Ionic framework?
The Ionic framework allows for the creation of highly interactive, cross-platform mobile applications that can be deployed across iOS, Android, and Windows devices. These hybrid applications include native functionalities, exhaustive gestures, and customizable tools to enhance user-friendliness. Those powerful capabilities are brought to Ionic because it provides mobile-friendly HTML, CSS, and JS CSS components to developers. Before jumping in with the framework, it is important to assess Ionic’s advantages and disadvantages.
Ionic is a great choice for creating basic native functionalities within an application to run on multiple devices and operating systems. The main Ionic advantages surround the simplicity that comes with developing an app once, rather than multiple times for separate devices. The nature of the framework also makes development fast and cost-efficient, while reducing the need for maintenance.
However, Ionic disadvantages also surround the fact that the application is not developed specifically for each device. Applications developed in Ionic may not perform as well as if they were developed natively, so some developers may rely on native development to ensure flawless performance and full use of native functionalities. In addition, Ionic demands a specific skillset from developers due to its current use of AngularJS and ui-router.
Whether you need an app developed quickly for deployment, require cross-platform apps with the quickest performance speeds, or want to further discuss Ionic advantages and disadvantages, contact AllianceTek today to find out if the Ionic framework is suitable for your needs,
KEY FEATURES:-
- Based on SASS and provides tons of UI components for creating robust and rich apps.
- Ionic comes transported with a powerful CLI, providing mobile app developers the ability to build and test Ionic apps on any platform.
- It provides custom elements and methods for interacting with them by using Angular.
- One such element, collection repeat, lets users to scroll through a list of thousands of items without any performance hits. Scroll-view is the component that creates a scrollable container with which developers can interact using a native-influenced delegate system.
- Provides all the functionality found in native mobile development SDKs, so users can create their apps, and customize them for OS or Android and deploy through Cordova.
ADVANTAGE:-
- Easy to learn: If you have familiarity with html, css and JavaScript you can learn it very fast
- Easy documentation: Ionic has very good and well documentation. Most of the things are covered in their official site. So you don’t have to move around different sites to learn.
- Rapid development: By running some command line commands, you can create pages (e.g. ionic g page your_ page_ name), providers etc. When you run a command it generates all files with template codes. So you don’t have to write everything from scratch.
- Ionic apps run on different platforms.g. Android, iOS, windows etc. As a result you don’t have to write codes for each platform. It reduces development time a lot.
- Develop an app once, and deploy across iOS, Android, and Windows devices.
- Framework’s focus on HTML, CSS, and JS enables quick development, low costs, and minimal maintenance.
- Platform Independent Framework
- It has the ability to acknowledge the platform specific optimized CSS equivalent to the native look and feel on various mobile Operating Systems. It reduced the need for code rewriting as it provides the codes of mobile-optimized HTML, JS, and CSS components. Apart from this, ionic integrates into Angular JS which becomes a robust structure making code excellent as well as more manageable. This empowers the Start-up entrepreneurs to come out with newer concepts at reduced budget.
- Default User Interface: It has many default CSS and JS components that cover most of the essential/basic things which you want to create into a mobile application. Apart from regular ones like buttons and navigation it also includes form inputs, lists, cards, sliding boxes and many more. These can be easily customized by adding CSS classes to the element.
- Feasible Cross Mobile App Development : Developing an application at once is very essential as it would be compatible with all the mobile devices. However, it needs extremely limited use of time, assets and efforts, and helps in giving a unified look and feel. Beside, Ionic assists in building applications rapidly with expertise, and deploys standard tools with a single code base.
- Built On AngularJS : If you’ve worked upon Ionic, then you would likely realize that it is developed on top of the Angular JS framework. Furthermore, Ionic framework shares compatibility with AngularJS, thus, the benefits of Angular JS development can be put to use too.
- Ionic framework is excellent for quick application ideas prototyping.
- Development cost is less compared to native iOS and Android applications.
DISADVANTAGE:-
- Performance: Native mobile application’s performance is better than ionic app. However, in most of the cases, performance gap is not noticeable.
- Security: If you are developing financial app e.g. app for bank, ionic framework is not recommended. It may not provide as much security as native application.
- Limited native functionality: There may be some native functions that may be not available in ionic framework. In that case you have to develop the plugin yourself. However, there are many plugins available to cover native functionalities.
- Building in-app navigation can be notably complex, as the ui-router is tricky to maneuver at present.
- It is not suited for high-end graphics dependent applications or games.
- Performances are not as good as native applications, namely animations, scrolling, and network operations.
- As mentioned, JavaScript animations are not as performant as native animations. However, there are JavaScript libraries, like tweenMAX, which provide decent animation performance on the devices.
- Possible performance issues depending on application type. But alternatives to Phone Gap do exist.
- Need for specialists. JS can be tricky to learn. And you'll need someone who can not only "do" JS, but also have deep knowledge of a handful of advanced libraries and technologies including Angular, Cordova, Ionic, etc.
- Early adopter risk. This technology is still in its infancy. Support keeps changing, standards keep changing, and libraries can be completely rewritten at any time.