Todo and roadmap

The starter app as it is now is only a beginning. This section contains ideas for smaller and bigger improvements.

To do: smaller improvements

• managing the modules and Javascript files is now a manual and error-prone task. There are techniques (e.g. require.js, browserify, gulp-inject, gulp-include-source etc) which can simplify this process.
• the required libraries (under lib/) are now hard-coded in the gulp.js file; it would be better to externalize them into a separate .json file
• add other commonly used features: local caching/synchronization, maps/geolocation, local notifications etc.
• come up with some kind of 'plugin' mechanism so that these integrations can be plugged in (or taken out) easily - right now, adding or removing a Parse integration or a Firebase integration requires manually changing the code in a number of places
• on the UI (visual) side, use SASS to develop some example visual themes (styles); maybe add a set of 'kitchen sink' pages to demo all of the Ionic components

Roadmap: bigger vision

As said, while the Ionic team has done a fantastic job to make hybrid app development easier, I am convinced there is still room for improvement, making things easier.

NOTE: the prospect of "easier" (and better) is very likely going to materialize in a big way with the advent of Ionic 2 - we can probably forget most of what I wrote above, and below, when Ionic 2 comes out.

App development can still be faster if we can easily plugin in ready-made components and avoid having to reinvent the routine stuff.

A framework like Rails has done some good work in this area by providing gems (pluggable components) and generators. Going forward I'd like to try out some ideas along these lines.

(yes, I know about Yeoman generators, maybe I should follow that track ... on the other hand could I keep the solution in the 'Ionic' and 'gulp' corner? so as not to throw too many technologies into the mix ...)

NOTE: there is an effort by the official AngularJS team called "Angular-CLI":

https://github.com/angular/angular-cli

This project has largely the same goals as what I described above: have a CLI to add/remove components and so on. However it works only with Angular 2, not with Angular 1.x. Again, with Ionic 2 this will not be an issue anymore (Ionic 2 is based on Angular 2).