What is Ionic 2?

Ionic 2 is a beautiful, open source, frontend 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 2 is performance efficient with its minimal DOM manipulation and hardware-accelerated transitions as compared to other frameworks in this league. Ionic uses Angular 2 as its JavaScript framework.

With the power of Angular inside a framework like Ionic 2, the possibilities are unlimited (we can use any Angular component inside Ionic as long as it makes sense in a mobile app). Ionic 2 has a very good integration with Cordova's device API. This means that we can access device APIs using Ionic Native 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.