I have a few apps that have been published in the Apple Store. They are esoteric and not big money makers. I keep them going for fun and for the community they serve.
My issue is that Jquery Mobile is no longer actively supported and these apps were created using JQM. They are slow and becoming tough to maintain. I am not a great coder. In fact, I’m pretty bad. I like the design end of things much more. I can use a little javascript. For someone like me, JQM made some things so easy. I’ve looked at lot of frameworks. I’ve tried using ionic, but it seems to depend on Angular.js. I have little knowledge of angular. I don’t want to spend a year trying to learn Angular.js in order to update my little apps.
Does ionic support javascript/jquery? ionic seems to be the only framework that has a built in list search. I need one for my apps, but in order to port them to ionic, I also need to be able to include a little javascript.
Ionic (2+) depends on Angular.
Ionic v1 depends on Angular.js.
These er different things.
No jQuery, Ionic is built on Angular.
Javascript can work, but if it’s only a few lines it is easy to rewrite that in Typescript (which is used internally with Angular)
You might consider Framework7 as a solution instead. Members of the Cordova team like it.
I resisted learning AngularJS years ago, but bit the bullet and glad I did. There are some great resources to come up to speed quickly on Angular. Plus, you don’t need to learn the whole framework.
There’s about to be a big change to the correct answer to this question, because when Ionic 4 comes out, you can in principle use any framework you want. (Maybe not really true, we’ll have to see what the practical limitations are.)
My advice is that you learn a well-supported reactive framework. Examples are: Angular, REACT, Ember. Reactive is the future of web programming (at least until the next “revolution” comes along). I know it’s grand strategy, not a simple fix for your legacy apps. But Angular is soooo much better than jQuery if you want things that users are coming to expect, like multiplayer, or non-game equivalents of multiplayer like instant messaging around a shared topic. So if you ever want to take things to the next level, you need a reactive framework in your toolbox.