One of the things I've always loved doing is creating throwaway apps that solve very simple problems. Historically these have been to educate me on the 'art of the possible', rather than actually produce something workable. I'd always fall at a hurdle, or find a gap in my learning that would take me off on a tangent - the next gap to try and fill. It's been a lifetime of constant learning, challenging myself to fill more and more of the gaps with oodles of potentially useless information.
[caption id="attachment_2016" align="aligncenter" width="687"]
Ionic Framework[/caption]
Luckily (or with amazing foresight), lots of this information is now becoming appropriate and useful.
As an example, a few years ago I was working at an organisation who got hit with a DDoS. The site was down for 36 hours before we got it back up, and I learnt an awful lot then that I thought would be pertinent for my future career. I discovered low level things about networking that I didn't think much of learning at the time, yet it's these small pieces of knowledge that make up the experience I have now.
I remember discovering Ionic around 2013 and following its creator, Max Lynch, on twitter. We exchanged a few platitudes and he helped me out with a couple of early gotchas. It was a great introduction to a community, and another advocate of my preconception that HTML5 would be 'good enough' for native apps - It wasn't long after the HTML5 LinkedIn post that blasted the idea that HTML5 was the future.
I'd also been working on an app for the Oxford & Cambridge boat race. I was adamant that using the accelerometer functionality in Cordova, it was possible to mimic a rowing motion and use your phone like a wii-mote. I prototyped a very simple solution and touted it round a few app development companies. They mostly laughed and suggested that I specified either iOS/Android, or double my costs. I then took it to the excelled team at Inviqa, who despite not having long started their app development journey at the time, agreed that I'd seen the potential and were able to complete the project under the budget that we'd originally ballparked.
HTML5 FC 1 - 0 Native FC
Since then I've played with Ionic at each stage of its development. It helped me establish my understanding of AngularJS, and been probably the exclusive partner to my investigations into Angular2+. I don't ply my trade as a developer, but as a technical generalist - and the concepts, documentation and community around Ionic have been superb in offering the support, patterns and scaffolding to help shape the new propositions that I nurture.
It was with fair trepidation that I ended up advocating a relatively straightforward application at my place of work; for internal use only and running on Ionic2. I've had my battles (with myself, not the framework) in deciding on my application structure, but I've got there. I have a wonderfully clean and well organised application that fulfils the role of PoC admirably. The code is clean and well written enough for me to be comfortable in handing it over to a more established developer. The README.md file could simply state: "Built using https://ionicframework.com - see the docs! (Of course the documentation is slightly more comprehensive than that...)
With the advancement of web APIs (see https://whatwebcando.today/) enabling frameworks like cordova to start to get 'native' functionality 'in the browser' and Ionic's support for building Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) out of the box, I can see a very bright future for HTML5. My biggest concern is that whilst competing on functionality may be the sexier opportunity, the HTML5 apps community can design these new APIs with the UX around security built in from the start.