What is Ionic?

Ionic is a beautiful, open source, front-end SDK for developing hybrid mobile apps with HTML5. Ionic provides mobile-optimized HTML, CSS, and JS components, as well as gestures and tools for building highly interactive apps.

Ionic is performance efficient with its minimal DOM manipulation and hardware-accelerated transitions as compared to other frameworks in this league. Ionic uses AngularJS as its JavaScript framework.

With the power of AngularJS inside a framework like Ionic, the possibilities are unlimited (you can use any AngularJS component inside Ionic as long as it makes sense in a mobile app). Ionic has a very good integration with Cordova's device API. This means that you can access device APIs using a library like ngCordova and integrate it with the beautiful user interface components of Ionic.

Ionic has its own Command Line Interface (CLI) to scaffold, develop, and deploy Ionic apps. Before we start working with the Ionic CLI, we need to set up a few pieces of software.