Hybrid Application Development (PhoneGap, Cordova, Ionic) Under The Hood

I am trying to understand how everything works, but have some questions about this topic. I will explain how I understand this stuff. First of all lets start from Cordova thi

Solution 1:

1) All of the libraries / frameworks you mentioned in your first question are a little different.

• Ionic provides a UI framework (i.e. controls) to be used in hybrid apps as well as angular services to interact with the UI controls provided. It essentially gives you an entire stack on which to build you hybrid app.

• Onsen UI is another UI framework smaller and slightly more library agnostic than Ionic. Onsen does provide Angular bindings and services for their UI, but also works with plain old vanilla JS or jQuery. The upcoming version also supports React bindings.

• I cannot say too much about Sencha (I have not used it), but it is as well UI framework. Snecha, however, uses their own JS framework called ExtJS.

The use of the keyword HTML5 is more likely to advertise that the UI framework is using modern web technologies (Flexbox, etc.). I (and please someone correct me if I'm wrong) believe that that may be just a marketing ploy.

2) Technically, none are Hybrid specific. You are correct in believing that they can be used in a desktop browser environment. That being said, the UI components are designed for mobile and would not look very appealing on desktop. They are best suited for Hybrid apps and mobile web apps. Ionic is even pushing for progressive web apps and plans on extending support for desktop (including electron).

3) Installing these frameworks via a package manager is a matter of convenience as well. You easily could copy the files over (Ionics's website explains that you can do this). and manually compile the styles, but it's more work to get things working correctly. Some, like Ionic have a CLI installed through NPM, but the framework is typically installed via bower. It also makes it easy to upgrade when a new version is released. Overall, you could ask, why use package managers for any language / platform, and it comes down to organization and conveniences.

I hope I answered all your questions, and if not please leave a comment.