Josh, Matt, Ben, and Max discuss what the Ionic team has been up to, including Ionic 4, Stencil, and Capacitor.

Show Outline:

Stencil background: How it came to be when creating Ionic 4 

Our bet on web components and how they help us make Ionic 4 the most performant Ionic yet.  

Angular 8 release: Their “batteries included” approach is beloved by developers and the ionic team 

Shadow DOM and Web Components: Unlocking customizability  

CSS variables: Required to use Shadow DOM. To see the power behind them, check out the Color Generator tool

Ben swears. Bad Ben! 

Why upgrade to Ionic 4? “It’s just Angular” for the most part. See our migration guide. New release notes docs page.  

Ionic docs: Renewed effort to “make the docs dope”

Max email from schools teaching web development.  An investment in Ionic is an investment that sticks with you because it’s “just” web dev. 

Status of Ionic React - when is 1.0 coming? 

Trolling Matt: Tweet @matthewkremer about how to build a WhatsApp clone 

Capacitor: background, history of this new project. 

Who’s building apps with Capacitor today? Community app shout outs, including Volleyball score, Sencrop, Groot News Radio, Sworkit, Southwest Airlines

Ionic’s own Matt Kremer porting Pokemon field guide app GoRanger from Ionic 3 + Cordova to Ionic 4 + Capacitor 

Stencil One beta: Focused on stability, constructible stylesheets, incredibly small bundle sizes. Updated compiler offers faster compilation speed.

Company pain points: Love Stencil because teams often use a variety of web frameworks. They can build reusable web components that teams can share, thus avoiding having to reinvent the wheel each time. 

Q&A from the community, including tools that the Ionic team uses 

Conclusion: Where do you see Ionic in 10 years?  

“We’re a Web Company.” - Mic drop from Ben