Ionic 2 Beta 11 Is Here!

Framework Ionic 2 has just launched its 11th Beta. The new version includes a number of bug fixes and enhancements. Not only that, it also levels the playing field for a release candidate. There’s likely to be one more beta version before the release candidate arrives.

 

Some vital changes have taken place in Ionic 2. So, if you are trying to upgrade to Beta 11 for better mobile front end development, please follow the instructions carefully.

 

Here are the changes that the Beta 11 offers:

 

Tabs

 

The tabs have been updated to go with the latest version of the Material Design spec. Put simply, tabs have been pushed down to the bottom of the screen. However, you have the option to override this in an app’s config. And the config options are in the upgrade instructions.

 

Overlays

 

All the overlay components like Alert, Popover, Modal etc. should now be created using their injected controller. For instance, you don’t have to use a static method anymore to create an Alert. There’s an AlertController provider injected into a component for you. By injecting the overlay providers, unit testing components has now become so much easier.

 

Upgrade in Angular

 

The Beta 11 will utilize Angular RC 4 and take advantage of the new @angular/forms module.

 

The wait for Beta 12…

 

Now that Beta 11 is here, mobile front end development professionals are looking forward to seeing the changes in Ionic 2 Beta 12 and the Ionic 2 release candidate after that. Here’s what to expect in Beta 12:

 

Improved Performances

 

AoT

 

Ionic 2 will maximize the benefit of AoT or Ahead-of-time compiling to pre-process Angular templates. AoT compiling shifts the parsing and compiling from runtime to build process, which leads to markedly faster start-up times. Otherwise, a template has to be parsed and compiled in order to be executed. AoT makes the process much faster and easier.

 

WKWebView for iOS

 

Besides AoT compiling, there’s a way to faster WebView on iOS now. It’s called WKWebView and it’ll lead to notable improvements in performance.

 

URL Assistance

 

For Progressive mobile front end development, URL support is extremely important. URL is getting a lot of attention from developers at Ionic these days. It’ll take some more time before the URL support gets ready for use.

 

Tree Shaking

 

A new front end programming process will be introduced in Beta 12. It will make use of a technique known as “tree shaking.” Tree shaking is basically used for shrinking the build output to only include the JS and CSS components that are being used. In order to use tree shaking to its maximum potential, Ionic is moving from Browserify to Webpack 2. This will speed up the build times and significantly minimize bundle sizes.

 

Also, the new build will have TypeScript 2.0 and will allow front end programming professionals to manage type definitions with npm.

 

Conclusion

Ionic is working on delivering a really great quality release candidate. And it thanks the community of amazing developers who have come forward and helped resolve an array of backend as well as front end programming issues through pull requests and GitHub issues.