I have few queries on selecting Ionic framework for our Hybrid app project. Since I have not used Ionic before, few queries may seem idiotic. But i would request all to share their thoughts.
Q1. How easy it is to customize any ionic components as per project requirement in both JavaScript and CSS level?
Q2. How much overhead ionic components create in terms of DOM, Memory usage?
Q3. In case of collection-repeat, say i want to display 10 items out of 1000 items at a time. So at any point in time only say, will there be only 10 divs and will only new data be injected in the previous created divs?
Q4. Say, I have selected Ionic for our project but don't need all the UI or other components in it. So does Ionic gives the flexibility to exclude those components from the framework itself and use the rest?
Q5. How easy it is to include an external library into Ionic if required?
Q6. How easy to debug and Ionic app and the tools available?
Q1. Since Ionic is based on SCSS, it's really easy to customize the visual aspects. I did a video about working with scss and Ionic. As for the javascript side of things, if you know how to work with directives, you should be good.
Q2. Ionic aims to the keep the DOM nice and lean, and not change the DOM like you would with jQuery. As far as memory usage, that really depends on the code you write. You still need to write good code to make sure there aren't memory leaks any where.
Q3. Collection-Repeat doesn't really work that way. Plus when you start dealing with different screen heights, it's not going to be easy to deal with. The best why that we've come up with to deal with that is to just render how ever many it will take to fill the view.
Q4. At the moment no, if you start a project with the CLI, you get the whole bundle. Down the road we're thinking about breaking things into external components, but it's not set up yet.
Q5. It's Angular, so if you have another angular directive that you want to include, the process is really simple. Just include the script tag and inject the module as a dependency. If it's not an angular module, then it's a bit more work to wrap it in a directive, but there are plenty of tutorials out there to help.
Q6. The best thing to remember is that we're dealing with a webview, so you can do a lot of debugging right from chrome on desktop. If you need more debugging once you're on a device, iOS lets you debug right from safari on desktop, and android 4.4+ let's you debug app on a device with chrome.