Ionic is one of the top hybrid app development frameworks in the current market, and It is an open-source SDK to develop the Cross-Platform Mobile Application. It involves three crucial elements that are Sass-based UI framework, which optimized explicitly for mobile UIs. Secondly, the Angular framework helps to develop scalable applications quickly. And the third one is the compiler (PhoneGap or Cordova) used for the native apps with JavaScript, HTML & CSS. This useful framework includes various functional CSS components out-of-the-box.
Ionic four has introduced recently, and it is almost the same as Ionic 3. The upgrades that are involved in Ionic four are performance and building time improvements, powerful themes capabilities, multi-framework compatibility, and brand new documentation. The development from V1 to V2 was the most challenging transition to do for the major version. The angular v2 to v3 becomes easy because you are in touch with the angular. The Ionic team improved the framework for migration. With Ionic 4, they provided a migrating tool that makes the migration work easy.
Its primary purpose is to make Ionic a robust framework to build mobile progressive web apps that access the native device features. Ionic four has come with specific technologies, tools, and concepts like Stencil, Capacitor, Ionic Native 5, and Ionic PWA Toolkit; Through Ionic four, it becomes possible to using Ionic Components with React, Vue, Angular, or with no framework is possible.
Features Of Ionic Four – The Changed And The New One
Ionic four produces new features like internal code refactoring with Stencil and an alternative to using other frameworks instead of Angular. Now Developers can continue advancing their applications with minimum consequence.
Web Components
The most significant change in the Ionic four is for each component they moved to web components. What are web components?
Web components are the combination of web platform APIs that allows creating new custom, reusable, encapsulated HTML tags used in web pages and web apps. The custom widgets and the components create on the Web Component standards work beyond modern browsers and used with any JavaScript library or framework that is working with HTML.
Without writing a significant amount of code, Web Components push the work to the browsers, and this enhances the performance of the startup times. Web Components create a substantial impact on developing high-performance Progressive Web Apps.
Following Are The Important Terms On Which Web components Is based:
Custom Elements
Custom Elements allows us to modernize the HTML. Web developers create new HTML tags, beef-up existing HTML tags, and extend the functionality of the components that other developers created. It generates the foundation for designing and using new types of DOM elements.
Shadow DOM
Shadow DOM is designed as a tool to create component-based apps. It fixes the CSS and DOM. It introduces scoped styles to the web platform. Without tools or naming conventions, you can bundle CSS with markup, hide implementation details, and write self-contained components in vanilla JavaScript.
When a new HTML is used, there are possibilities that it conflicts with the current name used by the page. Subtle bugs, CSS specificity (!important all the things), Most of the time’s style selectors get out of control, and performance suffers greatly.
HTML imports
HTML imports is the inclusion and reuse of HTML documents in any other HTML documents.
HTML Template:
It describes how to represent fragments of markup that are not usable at the page load, but on runtime, it can instantiate.
Stencil:
The Stencil is a new web component compiler built by the Ionic team to meet the following purposes:
- Framework agnostic – It is not bound by or attached to a particular front-end framework. It works with any other JavaScript framework (Vue, React, Preact, and others) or with no framework at all.
- Develop standards-compliant web components.
- Uses additional APIs such as TypeScript, Virtual DOM, JSX, and async rendering ideally suits the Progressive web Apps (runs appropriately on the slow/fast networks, small code size, quick execution/rendering times, interoperable across different browsers & devices).
Capacitor
The Capacitor is a cross-platform API and code performance layer that makes it simple to call Native SDKs from web code and to write custom native plugins that your app may require. And it also provides first-class Progressive Web App support to write one app and deploy it to many different platforms.
PWA Enable
Nowadays, Progressive Web App development is trending; many leading companies have chosen PWA for their app development. Ionic four is built out-of-the-box for being the best UI framework to create high-performance PWAs. The Ionic team has assembled a web component pipeline using Stencil to create Ionic’s components, assuring they are tightly packed, lazy-loaded, and delivered in stylish collections consisting of components for asynchronous components for the loading and delivery.
1.5X Faster
According to the Ionic Dev team, more than 100 Ionic components are required for performance improvement, theme customizability, UI. It includes a complete iOS and Material Design refresh for each component to match the standards on iOS and Android.
Ionic components are optimized to load and render the performance. Every component is presently a Web Component and created with the new Web Component compiler project Stencil, which scores 100 on Google’s Lighthouse benchmark tool.
Built for Customization
One of the significant features of Ionic 4 is it can move using native CSS Custom Properties, also known as CSS Variables, in every component.
CSS Custom Properties makes it possible to expose a “public theme API” that gives structure to developers, and modifications immediately happen by targeting Ionic’s public theming API through the published, documented CSS Custom Properties.
Ionic Four Introduced Following Components:
Ion-backdrop
They are full-screen components that overlap other components. The changes on top of additional content and are used to exclude any component.
ion-ripple-effect
This component adds the Material Design ink ripple interaction effect. It is designed to be effective, noninvasive, and usable without adding any additional DOM to your elements. It works without JavaScript degrades.
ion-route
It uses a component, and executes it during the Browser URL matches the URL prop.
ion-reorder
It provides things to be dragged to change its order horizontally. It can be used with an ion-reorder-group to present a visual drag and drop interface.
ion-search bar
Search bars represent a text field that is applied to the search through the collection. In their v4, the Ionic team has added nine different search bar styles that provides a great look.
ion-show-when
When a query evaluates to the true, It shows it’s child contents automatic. show when watch for the platform changes, mode changes, CSS media queries, and device orientation.
ion-select-popover
It is a dialog that appears on top of the current page and used for the overflow actions that don’t implement in the navigation bar.
ion-skeleton-text
Skeleton Text is to render placeholder content. The element renders an old block in the specified width.
Color Changes
The default color has changed, and some new default color is also attached.
Ionicons 4.0
The modern designed icons used on the Web, iOS, Android, and desktop apps. Support to the SVG and web font is now available and distributed as the web components with the decreased size and brand new icon forms reflecting the latest iOS and Material Design styles.
CSS Variables
They are the core of Ionic’s theming that transform the overall appearance and feel of your app, change a few variables, all without building tools.
Framework Integration & Compatibility
The old version of the Ionic framework is linked with Angular, In V4 the Ionic team has redirected the framework to work as a standalone Web Component library, with the latest JavaScript frameworks integrations, like Angular, now it is also a framework-agnostic, means it works with any other JavaScript framework (Vue, React, Preact, and many other), or with no framework. Still, its in beta, Thus support for other frameworks is required in the future statement.
Ionic Framework V4 is a significant advantage in the underlying technology and capabilities of the project. It’s most significant benefit is to create continuous internal changes, without requiring similar Angular framework updates. The same is implemented for Vue, React, or no framework. Through the ionic@angular, the primary purpose is to make it simple to select Ionic in the most successful frameworks using its current patterns.
Ionic CLI (Command Line Interface) 4.0
Ionic CLI(Command Line Interface) is a device that provides several essential commands to the Ionic developers. Ionic CLI is the engine that renders the option to choose a different framework when generating an Ionic project (Angular by default). The new CLI has been created to work beside the Angular CLI; thus, get the best of both worlds.
To install and update Ionic, the CLI arrives with a built-in development server, allowing powerful Cordova integration with live reload, build and debugging tools, custom schematics for generators, and others. If you are a member of Ionic Pro, then the CLI is used to implement cloud builds and deployments and administer your account.
Routing in Ionic
The prominent feature introduced in Ionic 4 is the change in routing. Now Ionic 4 is using native Angular Routing with some twist. In place of, pushing components directly into ion-nav, you need to map those components to routes. The apps should have an individual ion-router component in the codebase. This component manages all interactions with the browser history, and aggregates updates through an event system make it easier to support to build PWA’s natively. For Angular projects, use the ion-router-outlet and the Angular router.
Lazy Loading
It is a design model in the Ionic framework used to differentiate the initialization of components until it required. By breaking it into multiple bundles and loading them on demand, It enhances performance and speeds up the application load time.
Ionic Native 5
Native five have brought the project to complete framework-agnostic status, where the components work in any famous framework, or without one. It needs Angular 5 to select to use injectables/providers.
Framework’s Tooling
Ionic 4 allows using the framework’s proper tooling to create, bundling, and routing and get the most out of the framework’s ecosystem. It means to use the Angular CLI while using Ionic with Angular, Vue CLI with Vue.js, and others.
Changelogs in Native 5
- It is exported with three packages first, with Angular (5.x+) providers, ES6 modules, and a bundle with AngularJS support.
- The ES6 and bundle delivered static feature classes for plugins.
- Ionic devs using Angular select between using injectables, or import and use the ES6 plugins statically.
New Documentation
The Ionic team redesigned and drastically changed the Ionic Framework documentation, increased the load and navigation performance, and makes it simpler to update and maintain. They scored more examples and previews along with more code snippets and able to drop immediately into your app. The new docs are created with Web Component compiler Stencil, and they are also open-source.
Conclusion
Ionic 4 comes with some changes like internal code refactoring with Stencil and the option to use other frameworks instead of Angular. We are very interested in additional stencil development and watch how that appropriate tool is being combined into the Ionic CLI. Ionic 4 has transformed the Ionic App Development to a whole another level and increase the cross-platform application that run’s on mobile platforms, Web, as PWAs, and Desktop.
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