Ionic Blog

Announcing Portals for React Native

Today we are thrilled to announce React Native support for Portals, our new SDK for building mobile apps that utilize a micro-frontend architecture to scale app development across teams in large organizations.

Portals makes it possible to embed micro-frontend web experiences into a single React Native app through a drop-in React Native component. A Portals component hosts a Web View but extends it with powerful functionality such as the ability to expose native functionality to each Web View in a controlled, safe manner, and best-practices around implementing the Web View lifecycle. Most importantly, each Portal can be updated remotely in real-time, so teams can ship bug fixes and new features in parallel and as soon as they’re ready.

With this, Portals for React Native allows React Native teams to:

Share React web code with their React Native mobile app and enable React web teams to contribute to the app
Embed existing web experiences in a seamless, high-quality way that feels just as native as the rest of the app
Ship faster by enabling teams to publish updates in parallel and in real-time, without the bottleneck of traditional mobile releases

Portals also supports traditional iOS and Android apps and hybrid apps, and can be used across a variety of mobile frameworks and technologies a team may be using. Portals is in production in a number of significant mobile apps built by large teams, helping them scale and ship faster.

Take Control of Your Capacitor App State

By Simon Grimm on July 7, 2022 in Capacitor Capacitor plugins

This is a guest post from Simon Grimm, Ionic Developer Expert and educator at the Ionic Academy. Simon runs a YouTube channel where he helps web developers build awesome mobile apps based on their existing skills!

What happens when your app goes to the background? How do you react when your app is restored? These questions and more can be answered by adding the Capacitor App plugin to your app, which brings a handful of utility functions and listeners to your web native app!

In this tutorial we will explore all features of the plugin to control our state, catch events like the Android back button or restored app state, and finally even add a simple handler for a custom URL scheme to open our app!

Using HarperDB in your Ionic App

By Mike Hartington on June 30, 2022 in Tutorials HarperDB Ionic React react SQL

Something I like to do is evaluate various Database services to see what the latest and greatest offerings are. One name that came up in my research was HarperDB. HarperDB is a distributed SQL/NoSQL database with a built-in HTTP API, that can be deployed anywhere from edge to cloud. To stretch my SQL-muscles a bit, I decided to check out HarperDB and see what it was all about. We’ll build a basic app that performs all the standard CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete) and see what it’s like working with HarperDB.

Build Cross Platform Components with Stencil and Capacitor

By Anthony Giuliano on June 28, 2022 in Tutorials Capacitor Design Systems stencil web components

Introduction

The overwhelming majority of design systems that exist today are built for the web. While this is great for web developers, the web is not the only platform that people use. It doesn’t take a 10x developer to see that mobile apps are just as common as web applications. Yet, so many design systems seem to be built without the mobile experience in mind. In this tutorial, we’ll break out of this web centric mindset and see how we can build components that are suitable for the web and mobile. If you’re worried that we’ll have to use Swift or Java or Kotlin, fear not. We’re going to build cross platform components solely with web technologies using Stencil and Capacitor.

Ioniconf 2022 Recap

By Michael Ellis on June 23, 2022 in Announcements community Ioniconf

Ioniconf 2022 has concluded and we are here to recap the event for anyone who might have missed it. On May 25th, 2022, we hosted the third-ever ioniconf conference for our community of developers and users. The event was a big success, with 4,200 viewers tuning in on the day of the event. This year, the focus of ioniconf was once again on recognizing and celebrating the amazing contributors, developers, and users of Ionic, Stencil, and Capacitor that make our community so wonderful and welcoming.
Read more…

Capacitor ❤️’s Ionic’s Visual Studio Code Extension

By Thomas Vidas on June 3, 2022 in Capacitor Capacitor VS Code

We’ve been making a lot of buzz about our new VS Code Extension for Ionic Framework. But, you may not know that the extension works with other Capacitor projects as well. In this post, we’ll go over three great features of the Ionic extension that you can leverage for your Capacitor project.

Announcing the Stencil Github Community

By Anthony Giuliano on June 2, 2022 in Announcements stencil

We are so excited to officially announce the creation of the Stencil community Github organization! This community org will be a central place for projects driven by our amazing community of Stencil developers. Let’s take a look at how the community will be set up and how you can get involved.

All the layers of Capacitor Google Maps

By Mike Hartington on May 31, 2022 in Engineering Capacitor Google Maps

This is a guest post from Grgur Grisogono, Ionic Trusted Partner and Director at Modus Create who loves connecting business with technology. As an avid supporter of all things JavaScript, Grgur enjoys telling stories and anecdotes fueled by the experience of working with dozens of Fortune 1000 companies. He can also talk lengths about sourdough baking, latte art, and bean-to-bar craft chocolate.

The newly released Google Maps plugin for Capacitor is built on top of remarkable new technology that goes far beyond mapping potential. This powerful innovation changes how your apps work in the hybrid environment and lays the foundation for previously unimaginable capabilities.

Let’s explore the new Capacitor Google Maps plugin. We will learn how you can make your app ready for the new plugin with the help of a reference app that you can check out on GitHub. We’ll also discuss how this plugin changes the landscape of hybrid and native app development.

Announcing Stencil v2.16

By Anthony Giuliano on May 31, 2022 in Announcements stencil

After a few patch releases, the next minor version of Stencil is here! Stencil v2.16 is filled with new, exciting features that we think you’ll really enjoy. We’ve also implemented some bug fixes that are sure to improve the Stencil developer experience. This release is filled with contributions from the community. As always, we are incredibly grateful for all the ways the community makes Stencil better. Now without further ado, let’s see what’s inside Stencil v2.16.

Fantastic Mobile Dev Tools, and Where to Find Them!

By Thomas Vidas on May 31, 2022 in Capacitor

A picture of a phone with the screen turned off

As a web developer first jumping into mobile development with Capacitor, the mobile ecosystem can be a bit overwhelming. Luckily, we’ve got you covered with a list of 6 excellent mobile dev tools that you can use to help take your development to the next level.