With the prevalence of mobile apps, more and more developers want to learn how to build mobile apps. Developers can choose iOS or Android platforms to develop mobile apps. But learning Objective-C/Swift or Java is not an easy task. Web development programming languages, HTML, JavaScript and CSS, are easier to understand and learn. Building mobile apps is made possible by Apache Cordova, which creates a new type of mobile apps — Hybrid mobile apps. Hybrid mobile apps are actually running in an internal brower inside a wrapper created by Apache Cordova. With hybrid mobile apps, we can have one single code base for different platforms. Developers also can use their existing web development skills.
Ionic framework builds on top of Apache Cordova and provides out-of-box components which make developing hybrid mobile apps much easier. Ionic uses Angular as the JavaScript framework and has nice default UI style with similar look & feel as native apps. Firebase is a realtime database which can be accessed in web apps using JavaScript. With Ionic and Firebase, you just need to develop front-end code. You don’t need to manage any back-end code or servers.
This book is a complete guide to build hybrid mobile apps using Ionic and Firebase. This book is sample driven. In this book, we are going to build a Hacker News client app. This app can view top stories in Hacker News, view comments of a story, add stories to favorites, etc. This book covers various topics in mobile apps development:
- Local development environment setup
- Ionic quickstart
- Work with Firebase
- State transition
- Common UI components: lists, cards, modals, popups
- Forms & inputs
- User authentication
- Publish apps
Source code of the sample app is available on GitHub. View screen-shots of the sample at here.
