Ionic 2 - development process is slow

Ionic Framework ionic-v3
1

I am just building a new app with the new ionic 2, and it seems quite nice, with many new stuff to learn: angular 2, webpack, typescript etc.

My problem is, as you all do while programing is quickly testing the code on your browser for errors and simply viewing what happens. This process is SUPER SLOW…

Each change needs to be packed by webpack so each: console.log, alert or whatever I need to wait it to pack it and then refresh and only then review.

It takes like at least 6-7 seconds per change…

Any ideas on how to improve this development flow?

2

This is something that we’re actively looking to improve.

The whole build process is quite complex since it needs

  • convert TS to JS
  • Bundle all the code that an app depends on
  • inject that into the build/ directory

Having all that does take some time. We are working to revamp our tooling and bundling process, so hopefully this will improve.

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3

Only thing I can contribute/recommend is using SSD drives as opposed to older mechanical spinning drives. Using an SDD and preferably a fast one makes a huge difference from my experience, however, in all likelihood most developers are already using macbook pros with SSD drives these days

4

I am using a 2015 macbook pro with SSD and for a simple app it still takes a few seconds.

5

Not to show too much disagreement here, but for some perspective, we’ve been using Xamarin.Android for the past 2 years and switched to Ionic a few months ago. In our experience, we have found the Ionic + Cordova + Angular + JavaScript iteration cycle to be much better. This is due largely from being able to test without deploying to the device/emulator for every iteration. And for when we actually do have to deploy to the device, we have the ability to serve off our dev machine via the webpack dev server and this significantly decreases the iteration cycle as compared to a full deploy. So if we had previously made a console.log change equivalent, the iteration cycle would be far more than a few seconds.

So, I love that Ionic is working toward improving the development cycle. I just wanted to say how much I’ve genuinely appreciated the tooling and in particular all of these development cycle optimizations already in play.

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