Ionic suitability for a large scale app?

Hi all.

My sincerest apologies if this isn’t the correct place to post this.

I was wondering how suitable Ionic is for a large scale app?

I haven’t delved into Ionic much yet and my experience of a HTML5 app was using Sencha Touch to build an app for a client (there wasn’t ever a large amount of users using it at any one time) and wrapped into Android and iOS apps using Cordova. It worked really well (CORS issues aside) but because it wasn’t native it felt rather clunky and “forced” and not to mention “hacky” because of CSS overrides, positions etc and this is what I’m concerned about with Ionic.

My company is creating a platform for trading goods and a typical scenario might be that a particular item has tens of thousands (maybe more) of different variations, and each with different variations again etc and this must be narrowed down using select fields. The user can then find items to trade with. All of this searching and narrowing down would obviously be handled by the server and DBs so all Ionic would need to do is display the data and lazy load the next page etc.

Would Ionic perform? I’m looking at Ionic because of the native UI it provides across the different platforms (and one code stream) and we need it to look identical whether it’s running on iOS or Android. The only sticking point here is I would need to get my head around Angular/Ionic API but that’s fine. I’m also concerned about the hacky nature of manually styling components, positioning etc which you don’t really get with native development (significantly less so at least).

I’m receiving a bit of resistance from one of my guys with using this over Java/Swift for native apps. An honest assessment would be much appreciated.

I’ve also just read about Ionic 4 being framework agnostic (when it’s released) so would this mean that I wouldn’t need to learn Angular? (I.e. would ExtJS/JavaScript/Ajax work?)

I really appreciate your thoughts and advice.

Thanks guys :smile:

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Hi,

-> I was wondering how suitable Ionic is for a large scale app?

See: http://blog.ionicframework.com/built-with-ionic-microsoft-flow-app/

I moved to Ionic having previously used Sencha Touch. Take a look at the Ionic-related post’s on my blog: https://robferguson.org/blog/

Would Ionic perform?

See: http://blog.ionicframework.com/how-to-make-pwas-with-ionic/

-> I’m receiving a bit of resistance from one of my guys with using this over Java/Swift for native apps. An honest assessment would be much appreciated.

Can you afford the time, cost and effort to support multiple code bases?

See: https://github.com/Robinyo/big-top

“A sample app that demonstrates how one codebase can be used for Mobile (iOS, Android and Windows Phone) and Desktop (masOS, Linux and Windows) platforms.”

Cheers
Rob

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Hi Rob,

Thank you for your response. There are some great posts here so I’ll be sure to go through them. Probably even act as a guide!

As for multiple code bases we want to get something available (a prototype by end of first quarter next year ideally) which is why Ionic seems like a good choice as we can just write the code once.

There are only 2 of us (possibly 3) and with other projects going on juggling multiple code bases would probably overstretch ourselves.

Thanks :smile:

In theory this is correct. However, I’m not sure how much you save by not learning Angular, because reactive programming seems to be the way to go, so you’d be well served learning RxJS extensions to ExtJS, and RxJS is already baked into Angular. When the Ionic team talks about non-Angular frameworks that work with Ionic, they always refer to reactive ones, like React or Vue. Not sure ExtJS is in that category exactly. You don’t need Angular, but you probably want more than vanilla ExtJS.

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To add to the great suggestions made earlier:

If ui tweaking, edpecially gestures, specific animations and so on are keyto you client, then any other framework then native will causesome sort of headaches

If in yourcase thedata is key then the proper data modelling is more paramount to achieve perfomsnce. So the server side then becomes something to work on more.

Aint no clear cut decisionnpoints. But you are to prove viability through an app an create a working tool asap then i would go for Ionic. And if you can afford wsiting, make a decision on angular vs vue vs react vs jquery in combination with ionic 4

Using Ionic is a much nicer experience than using Sencha Touch back then. Soooo much nicer.

Thanks for your advice guys.

I decided to go with React Native in the end but will keep an eye on Ionic in the future!