Ionic is a free and open source library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS, and JavaScript components, gestures, and tools that can be used to build highly interactive mobile apps. Being built around the widely used Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (Sass) and AngularJS technologies, Ionic offers web developers with a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript an opportunity to develop cross-platform mobile applications.
In this chapter, we'll cover the following:
- Setting up your Ionic web services
- Creating your first Ionic application
- Using Ionic View to test your applications
- Sharing your creation with your collaborators
In Chapter 1, Setting Up Your Workspace, we highlighted the basic essentials of setting up your workspace for Ionic, which included an installation of the core Ionic libraries as well as the Android and iOS SDKs.
In this section, we will further elaborate on setting up an account on ionic.io, which is the web service that allows us to easily deploy and test our creations on Android and iOS devices through the Ionic View application. Through the Ionic web service, we will also be able to configure capabilities such as push notifications, which are an excellent way of interacting with your application's audience.
In order to start off with setting up your ionic.io web account, visit apps.ionic.io and click on Sign Up:
The signup screen looks like the following screenshot:
When filling in the essential details, you'll be welcomed with the following screen, which will give you an overall view of setting up your first Ionic project:
