Ionic 4 is a reliable and most preferred mobile app framework utilized for developing hybrid mobile apps. The framework comprises of various tools and features that are used in hybrid app development. Ionic is an open source HTML5 Software Development Kit (SDK).
The primary components of Ionic are Saas based user interface, Angular and a Compiler.
As far as new features are concerned, the latest version, Ionic 4 beta has come up with a variety of new features and tools for a better experience. This version has been launched in January 2019 and is grabbing the attention of experts because of its versatile features and functionalities.
Among the added features: improvement in performance, and build-time, robust theming capabilities, multi-framework compatibility, new documentation are the highlighted ones. With an extraordinary change in the material design, the Ionic Angular 4 is 1.5 times better than Ionic Angular 3.
Let’s learn about the newly introduced features in Ionic 4 one by one:
Stencil:
It is a web component compiler that works with many front-end frameworks. It uses additional APIs like TypeScript, Virtual DOM and JSX, especially for progressive web apps.
Web Components:
In Ionic 4, web components have been developed for every component to save the efforts of writing the codes again and again thereby rendering performance improvement. The web components allow building reusable, new and custom encapsulated HTML tags for developing progressive web apps.
Capacitor:
It is an API that works on cross-platforms and is a code execution layer. It simplifies the process of calling the native SDKs and writes custom native plugins. The capacitor extends PWA support by enabling the developer to write one app and deploy it on different app stores and the mobile web.
Lazy Loading:
As the name suggests, Lazy Loading increases the speed of performance of the app by deferring the initialization of components. The focus here is to reduce the loading time of an app by dividing it into various bundles and loading them as per the need.
PWA Enabled:
Progressive Web Apps are in huge demand, and the team of Ionic has ensured that Ionic 4 contains all the state-of-the-art features like Stencil, Capacitor and Lazy Loading that make Ionic 4 as one of the preferred user interfaces for developing effective PWAs.
Routing:
This is again a new feature that brings change in routing. In Ionic 4, there will be no need of pushing the components directly into ion-nav; instead, the developer will have to map the components to specific routes. Ionic 4 is using native Angular routing.
Ionicons 4.0:
This is a collection of newly designed icons available for use in web, iOS, Android and desktop apps. They come in reduced sizes and are distributed as web components.
HTML Templates:
This is one of the four aspects of web components. HTML templates define how to declare code fragments of mark-up which are not used at the time of page load but can be initiated during the runtime.
Ionic Native 5:
Ionic Native 5 makes your project framework agnostic which implies that all the components can work with any of the popular frameworks or even without it.
The list of newly introduced features in Ionic 4 is quite long. Some other attractive features are listed below:
Ion Backdrop
Ion-Picker
Ion-Ripple Effect
Ion-Route
Ion-Searchbar
Color Changes
Ion-Select Popover
CSS Variables
Changelogs
Ion-Skeleton Text
Ion-Show-When
Tappable Items
Ion-Reorder
Now let’s look at the migration process.
Migration from Ionic 3.0 to Ionic 4.0
- Review Angular’s Release Guide
- Generate a new project
- Strat copying angular services, pipes, components, providers and styling
- Copy the rest of the application taking a page or a feature at a time
- Use official Angular Router for integration
- Embrace the official tooling of each framework for a consistent experience
- Use the loadChildren method of the Angular router for Lazy Loading
Conclusion
Ionic 4 has become the first choice of Ionic app developers as it has incorporated numerous enhancements that help develop cross-platform and progressive web apps.
The mentioned above features will benefit Ionic app development.
Read More: Most Popular Frameworks For Hybrid Mobile Development