If you’ve built a production Ionic app from scratch you’ll know all too well the significant amount of software engineering time that goes into integrating all the libraries, SDK’s, plugins, services, build processes etc to produce a functioning app. And then never ending ongoing work keeping the dependencies up to date. When new versions of
For the last few years we’ve offered a complete Ionic & App Engine starter project focused on social apps. Over time we’ve updated the codebase from Ionic v1 betas to the latest v3 along with the backend from the hosted Parse to the Parse framework running on the Google App Engine.
Shortly we’ll be launching our new Ionic 4 and Firebase/GCP based starter app called Lattice to help accelerate your app development.
The big focus for the initial release is providing a solid foundation for good development practices. This mean having multi-environment support throughout the code-base to support DevOps and GitOps practices, and integrating with GitLab and Google Cloud Platform to utilize the build and monitoring services they provide.
They say great minds think alike and over the last month the Ionic team launched their updated AppFlow service with a focus on DevOps, and Enterprise Engine to take the hassle out of dependencies and integrations. While there is some overlap we will be providing support for integrating with the AppFlow services which offers unique features such as the Live app deploys
DevOps is a hot topic in the software industry at the moment, and for good reason. Teams incorporating these practices are more productive, providing more value to the business and end users.
Companies with high performing teams are twice as likely to exceed:
- profitability, productivity, market share
- effectiveness and efficiency
- customer satisfaction ratings
- achievement of mission goals
So what is it exactly? Here’s the description of DevOps from the Microsoft website:
DevOps is a force enabler, putting the automation and process in place that allow your whole team, including less experienced developers, to be more effective. The processes in place increase the rate of features into production and also decreases the impact of issues that occur in production.
A cornerstone of any good software development process, even before DevOps was a thing, is having a continuous integration (CI) build.
Lattice comes with integration with the GitLab CI service, so every commit builds and tests the code, including running end-to-end integration tests on a dedicated CI environment and even building the Android .apk file.
So what could be holding you back from getting some DevOps talent onto your project? The Ionic blog post about DevOps said:
Experienced freelance senior developers that can develop high quality architecture and infrastructure code can cost $100/hour and up, which quickly gets expensive. But the Lattice source code gives you the code and documentation to get started properly at a tiny fraction of what it would cost to develop from scratch.
The code for the multi-project support and continuous integration builds has been developed and refined over the last few years in our Cloneder starter project which uses Ionic 3 and the Parse framework running on Google App Engine. This code has been the basis for apps such as “Just A Baby” which has been featured on Fox News, by Whoopi Goldberg on The View and many more.
We’re taking all this experience and channelling it into a new premium production-grade Ionic 4 and GCP/Firebase starter project with lots of core functionality used across many types of apps. If you’ve built and maintained an Ionic app you’ll know how much work it is. First to integrate all the plugins, libraries, frameworks and SDK’s, and then dealing with various issues as you try to upgrade to the latest versions. And then time to develop all those little nice-to-have’s which save you even more time in the long run.
How many hours would you save having a working, continuously tested app with DevOps practices built-in to start from?
Engage the Ion drive and launch your next app with Lattice in 2019!