I often see questions like “How do I use PHP/MySQL in Ionic?” or “Does Ionic work with X backend?” – these are reasonable questions, but it indicates a big misconception as to how integrating a backend with Ionic works. The technology that is used on the backend is completely irrelevant, as the backend and the […]
CouchDB, PouchDB, and Ionic 2: Adding Comments
Over the past few weeks, we have been building out a simple blogging application that is built with Ionic 2, CouchDB, and PouchDB. We have made quite a lot of progress so far, and in this tutorial, we will be adding the finishing touches on the core functionality. We already have the ability to add […]
CouchDB, PouchDB, and Ionic 2: Adding Posts and Live Data Updates
Up until this point in the series, I have placed a heavy emphasis on the theory behind what we are doing, like how CouchDB works and why we would want to use PouchDB. In this tutorial, we are going to focus on building out the blogging application we are creating with Ionic 2, CouchDB, and […]
CouchDB, PouchDB, and Ionic 2: Starting a New Project
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been introducing some of the theory behind creating applications powered by CouchDB. As promised, this week we will finally start actually building something with it. Over the next few tutorials, we will be building a blogging application in Ionic 2 that uses CouchDB as its database and backend. […]
CouchDB, PouchDB, and Ionic 2: Querying Data with MapReduce
In the first tutorial of this series I introduced CouchDB at a high level and touched on why you might want to use CouchDB over some other options, and why I think it makes a great companion for Ionic 2 applications. We mostly talked about CouchDB at a conceptual level, but in this tutorial, I […]
CouchDB, PouchDB, and Ionic 2: An Introduction
Databases. The creatures that often live somewhere in the cloud and hoard all of the data for your application. Although they can be troublesome to work with, they allow you to turn your isolated application into one that can share and communicate with the world. There are many different options available, and different options are […]
Dynamically Loading Markers with MongoDB in Ionic 2 – Part 2
In Part 1 of this tutorial series, we built a Node & Express server which uses MongoDB to store location data. We created a route that we could make a POST request to, and through supplying some data with that request it will return to us only locations that are within a certain proximity to […]
Dynamically Loading Markers with MongoDB in Ionic 2 – Part 1
In this tutorial series, we are going to cover how to dynamically load markers from a server and add them to a Google Map in Ionic 2. When dealing with a small number of markers it isn’t a big deal to just load them all and dump them into the map all at once, but […]
Building a CRUD Ionic 2 Application with Firebase & AngularFire
Firebase is one of the most powerful and popular Database as a Service (DBaaS) solutions available today. It provides a document based NoSQL database, with real-time capability, and it is hosted as a service by Firebase so you don’t need to worry about scaling your own servers. Support for Firebase in Ionic 2 has been […]
Creating Role Based Authentication with Passport in Ionic 2 – Part 2
In this tutorial series, we are walking through how to create a role-based authentication system with Ionic 2 using Passport. In short, we want to create a way to provide different users with different permissions, or roles, in the application. One example of this would be a chat room that allows all users to post […]
Creating Role Based Authentication with Passport in Ionic 2 – Part 1
There many ways we can authenticate users in Ionic 2 applications and most of them are quite simple to implement. We could use Ionic Auth, social logins (Facebook, Google, Twitter), Firebase, SuperLogin, your own custom authentication on your own server and many more. If all we need to do for authentication is to grant a […]
Using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for Custom Authentication in Ionic 2: Part 2
In Part 1 of this tutorial, we talked about what exactly a JSON Web Token (JWT) is, and walked through exactly how to build our very own JWT from scratch. To quickly recap what we learned: A JWT is a string that contains an encoded header, payload, and a verification signature They are in the […]
Using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for Custom Authentication in Ionic 2: Part 1
You may have heard the term JWT being thrown around lately, it seems to be picking up popularity – and for good reason. If you’re not familiar, JWT stands for JSON Web Tokens, which are little encoded strings that look like this: If you break this string up wherever there is a ., you get […]
Building a Hotel Booking App with Ionic 2, MongoDB & Node
A short while ago I wrote a tutorial on how to build a review application in Ionic 2 with the MEAN (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, and Node.js) stack. Although this was a reasonably advanced tutorial, since it also served as an introduction to MongoDB and creating a backend with Node I kept the application itself pretty […]
Part 2: Creating a Multiple User App with Ionic 2, PouchDB & CouchDB
In the last tutorial we discussed some strategies for creating a multi-user app with PouchDB and CouchDB, specifically in the relation to the todo application created in this tutorial. If you are unfamiliar with PouchDB and CouchDB I would recommend reading this post before going any further. In short, PouchDB is used to store data […]
Creating a Multiple User App with PouchDB & CouchDB
In a previous tutorial I covered how to create an offline application that syncs with a remote database when online. We created a todo application that used PouchDB to store data locally, which synced with a remote CouchDB database. If you’re not already familiar with CouchDB, it is a document based NoSQL database (rather than […]
Offline Syncing in Ionic 2 with PouchDB & CouchDB
Since I started travelling around Australia I’ve tried to keep things pretty minimal. I got rid of all the clothes I didn’t need, shoes, kitchen ware, furniture, cleaning products and so on. Basically, I tried to get rid of everything I didn’t need… yet I still have 2 iPhones, an iPad, 3 Android phones, a […]
Building a Review App with Ionic 2, MongoDB & Node
Throughout your adventures in web and mobile development, you may have heard of the MEAN stack, which (aside from sounding pretty badass) stands for MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, and Node.js. All of these technologies work together to allow you to create an application with a frontend and a backend. In this tutorial we will be creating […]
An Introduction to NoSQL for HTML5 Mobile Developers
If you’ve been hanging around in web land then there’s a good chance you’ve at least heard of NoSQL. It’s a broad term that can mean a lot of different things, but at its core it refers to a database that isn’t a typical relational style database (like MySQL, MSSQL, PostgreSQL and so on). For […]
Integrating Ionic 2 & 3 with the Dropbox API – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series of tutorials we started integrating Dropbox with an Ionic 2 application. We were able to create an application that can fetch a list of all the files and folders in a users Dropbox, and also allow the user to browse through their folders. The end result looked like this: […]
Integrating Ionic 2 & 3 with the Dropbox API – Part 1
In this tutorial, we are going to create an Ionic 2 application that integrates with the Dropbox API. We are going to create an application that will return a list of all the files and folders in your Dropbox, and allow you to traverse through the folders. We will be using the v2 version of […]
Syncing Data with PouchDB and Cloudant in Ionic 2
In previous articles I’ve broadly covered some local storage options for HTML5 mobile applications and more recently backend options for HTML5 mobile applications. Now I’m going to get a little more specific and cover a real world example of how to use PouchDB with Ionic 2, which encompasses both local storage and remote data storage. […]
A Summary of Backend Options for HTML5 Mobile Applications
A little while ago I compiled a post on local storage options for HTML5 mobile applications (if you want to dive a little deeper into this, Raymond Camden also recently released a book on client side data storage), and with the recent closure of Parse I feel like now is a good time to cover […]
Using Http to Fetch Remote Data from a Server in Ionic 2 & 3
Although some mobile applications are completely self contained (like calculators, soundboards, flashlight apps), many applications rely on pulling in data from an external source to function. Facebook has to pull in data for news feeds, Instagram the latest photos, weather apps the latest weather forecasts and so on. You may have seen my recent blog […]