Headless drupal Ionic application using restful drupal services for angular, ionic 4 and PWAs

Building Cordova app using Drupal services and ionic is one of the areas that I have been working on. This helps serve multiple use cases in the context of app development. Drupal acts as content repo and the Cordova App could consume content using the REST APIs. We use ionic because of hybrid, as well as its additional core features, faster, simple to develop and time-saving.

Google has been talking about Progressive Web Apps. These are simply web apps that give an app-like user experience to users and are built with Web Technologies and Ionic is at the forefront of implementing this. Ionic uses Angular which is an open source JavaScript framework to build web applications in HTML and JavaScript.

As my work in the last 1 year has been in this area with a live cross-platform solution. In this session would share some of the Key challenges and Simple solutions to make your App Cross-platform, Strategies to overcome deficiencies of ionic to build an App that is as close to a Native App.

In this session, we will walk through:

• Hybrid vs Native

• An Introduction to Ionic Application and Angular

• Why Ionic Framework?

• What is Ionic Pro and why?

• Why features and point to be taken care while we choose Drupal as a backend for mobile apps.

• What is Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and why do we need that?

• The process of making Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) with Ionic with a demonstration.

• How to use Drupal for mobile application.

• How to set up a Drupal 8 enabling REST.

• Building an ionic hello world application with predefined templates.

• Building a page and navigation between pages at Ionic.

• Integrate ionic with Drupal 8 using the REST services.

• Key Challenges in building Hybrid App and how to overcome them.

• Deficiencies of Ionic over Native App and the approaches we took to overcome the same.

This session also includes a detailed demonstration on Installing Ionic, Cordova and setting up the environment for development.

Creating a basic android application which includes,

• Creating an androi application
• Registration
• Login (include social auth)
• View news feed & like.
• Logout.

Intended Audience:

• Drupal developer with minimal knowledge of javascript and HTML

• A small introduction to Angular Will be more helpful to understand clearly

• Anyone interested in hybrid mobile application development

• Anyone to extend Drupal websites to mobile applications

Join my session, by the end of the session you will have a clear idea of Headless Drupal and the knowledge to build an ionic mobile application including converting the same to PWAs!