Creating a backend for your application has typically required a totally different skill set to what you might use for the front end. Over time, those lines have blurred as the likes of NodeJS and server-side JavaScript have risen in popularity. Now, with NestJS, you might not even feel like you are working on a […]
Dealing with CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) in Ionic Applications
Almost everybody who is developing Ionic applications will at some point or another run into a fun little error that looks something like this: The Access-Control-Allow-Origin error you see here is the result of the browser’s implementation of CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing). This is an exceedingly common error, but it is also something that is […]
Replicating a Cloudant Database to CouchDB
Last week, I wrote a tutorial that walked through how to set up a CouchDB database on a self-hosted Ubuntu server. I talked about some of the benefits of going for a self-hosted approach over using a service like Cloudant. One of the big benefits of the CouchDB protocol is how portable it is. With […]
Adding CAPTCHA to Ionic with NodeJS Middleware
When I built the Elite Ionic course, I built it as a PWA using Ionic. Anybody who signs up for the course can log in to the application and browse through the various modules. When people create accounts, they need passwords, and when passwords are involved they will inevitably be forgotten at some point. For […]
Creating a CouchDB Database on an Ubuntu Server (Digital Ocean)
One of the cool things about CouchDB is how portable it is. It can run just about anywhere and interact with other CouchDB style databases anywhere. Any database that speaks the CouchDB Replication Protocol will be able to interact with any other database that does the same. This is why we can use libraries like […]
Adding ES6/TypeScript Support to a NodeJS Server
In past tutorials, we have covered setting up a basic Node/Express server and even integrating a Node server with Ionic. Up until this point, we have just been using the standard ES5 JavaScript syntax when building the server. If you are used to using Ionic, and many readers of this blog would be, then you […]
Hosting an Ionic PWA with Firebase Hosting
Part 1: Building a Cryptocurrency Price Tracker PWA in Ionic Part 2: Preparing a Progressive Web Application for Production Part 3: Hosting a Progressive Web Application with Firebase Hosting (this tutorial) In the past couple of tutorials, we have been working on building a cryptocurrency price tracking application as a progressive web application in Ionic. […]
Integrating an Ionic Application with a NodeJS Backend
Developing on the client side with Ionic is a pleasure. It’s based on the web tech we know and love, and it runs straight in the browser so we can dive straight into the development in minutes. You can only get so far developing purely on the front-end/client-side, though. If your application needs to provide […]
Case Study: A Complex CouchDB/PouchDB Application in Ionic
Last week I wrote an article that gave a broad overview of the course software I built for the Elite Ionic course – a Progressive Web Application built with Ionic. This mostly detailed my approach to building it and any interesting issues I faced throughout the entire process. One point I did touch on was […]
Integrating a Backend with Ionic
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 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 […]