Before you start developing Ionic applications you'll have to install Node.js on your computer.

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. Node.js' package ecosystem, npm, is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world.

Official ionic 2 documentation recommends using 4.x version of node for stability, since Cordova has some issues with 5.x. At the moment of writing the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release was Node v4.4.2, so that's the one I installed. You can download Node.JS directly from its home page at the following link, or from their download page.

In comparison to Android, where you have only one real option regarding an IDE choice - which is an Android Studio - when you work with ionic you have lots of available choices. Basically, any code editor will work for ionic since ionic apps are being built (packaged) via script execution. Specifically, Ionic 2 is being built on ES6 and TypeScript, so it's best that the editor or IDE of choice can support these new languages. Official ionic 2 documentation recommends using Visual Studio Code, Atom, or WebStorm.

VS Code is a new editor that comes with support for ES6 syntax, as well as TypeScript support. It will also prompt users to include TypeScript definition files and download them from [Definitely Typed] (https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped). Visual Studio Code is free and works on OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Official Website

Atom is cross platform editor built on web technologies. Atom has many plugins to make ES6/TypeScript development very easy. If there isn't something provided by Atom or a plugin, you can even make a plugin yourself, using JavaScript. Atom works on OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Atom TypeScript Plugin

Official Website

WebStorm is a paid IDE that provides many features, such as advanced refactoring support, automatic compilation of code, and gulp/grunt/webpack support. Out of the box, WebStorm comes with support for ES6 and TypeScript, as well as Angular and Ionic syntax support.

Official Website

In the past I've worked both with WebStorm and Atom, and even though that WebStorm is much more powerful out of the box, I think that Atom can potentially be even more powerful with a combination of right plugins that are freely available - not to mention that Atom is completely free to use, compared to paid WebStorm. I haven't had a chance yet to try out Visual Studio Code, and since I really like Atom and I had great experiences with it in the past, I'm going to use it for development of Ionic 2 applications.

After I installed Atom I immediately installed some handy packages for it to help me with development:

• Project Manager - Since Atom works on the basis of folder based projects, this plugin makes it really easy to keep and manage a list of projects, saving their states and restoring them to where you left of when you open them again.
• TypeScript - Makes it significantly easier to develop in TypeScript with Atom by providing features like: Auto Complete, Type Information on Hover, Compile on save, Project Build support, and others.
• [Minimap] (https://atom.io/packages/minimap) - Gives a preview of the full source code of the opened file.
• [Docblockr] (https://atom.io/packages/docblockr) - Helps with writing JavasScript code documentation.
• [PlatformIO IDE Terminal] (https://atom.io/packages/platformio-ide-terminal) - Allows you to use your default terminal within Atom.

Following the official ionic [documentation] (http://ionicframework.com/docs/v2/getting-started/installation/), all we need to do is run npm install -g ionic@beta in the terminal and we'll have the latest version of ionic2 installed - note the @beta part, this means that ionic2 is still in beta phase at the moment I'm writing this.

After about a minute my terminal reported that [email protected] was successfully installed at C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\ionic.

After the extra fast installation of ionic2 I continued following the official [documentation] (http://ionicframework.com/docs/v2/getting-started/installation/). I run the ionic start Ionic --v2 command, which created Ionic folder, downloaded and set up the ionic project.

In my terminal I cd into this newly created folder and run the command ionic serve, but I got the error that I'm missing module gulp. To rectify this issue I run the command npm install gulp, and tried to serve the app again, but now I'm missing the gulp-watch module. I know realized that I need to install all of the devDependencies from package.json file, which weren't installed by default, so I do this.

Now, after installing all of the devDepenedencies I can finally run the ionic serve command successfully, which opens the Ionic project in my browser. Below you can see both the state of my Atom project and the hello world Ionic2 app which contains 3 tabs, out of which the two are completely empty.

If you go to [Ionic Marketplace] (https://market.ionic.io/starters) there's a Starters section where you have a great deal of different Starter Projects which you can download and give your project a great initial base with lots of functionality already developed. I've looked for the same for Android but I wasn't able to find anything. I think that this marketplace, that offers a lot of the starter projects for free, is a great tool for fast forwarding your projects.

Another useful tool for ionic is Ionic Lab. This tool gives you another way to build and preview your ionic apps, without the need to remember and type in the CLI (Command Line Interface) commands.

The tool is installed easily after it is downloaded from the website. Once you run it you simply add a root folder of your Ionic project and you are almost ready to start building and serving your app. I say almost ready because when I selected build option within the Ionic Lab the tool threw me an error that it cannot find the installed Android SDK and that I need to create an ANDROID_HOME environment variable and point it to the installation directory of my Android SDK, if it exists. Since I installed Android SDK when I was getting started with Android I simply created the required environment variable and pointed it to C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Android\sdk, after which the tool managed to build my project.

After I clicked on build option within Ionic Lab, the tool built the project for Android platform within the platforms\android folder of my Ionic project, and set the default Android version to 4.0.2 in platforms.json file (which is a file where you define platforms you want your Ionic project to build for). This resulted in Android.manifest file being generated with minSdkVersion and targetSdkVersion to be set to 16 and 22, respectively. So now when I tried to run the app I got an error stating that I needed to install android-22 on my machine.

Since I already set my Native Android version of the app to use 21 and 23 as minSdkVersion and targetSdkVersion, I decided to do the same for my ionic project. Firstly, I opened the file platforms\android\platforms.json and set the value to "android": "6.0.0", which is basically android-23. Then I opened the file config.xml in the root of my Ionic project and added the following so it is automatically applied on each new build:

<platform name="android">
    <allow-intent href="market:*"/>
    <preference name="android-minSdkVersion" value="21" />
    <preference name="android-targetSdkVersion" value="23" />
</platform>

I was hoping that this will be enough, since I have android-23 already installed on my machine, so I went back to Ionic Lab and pressed build again, but I once more got the error to install android-22. I decided to do the suggested and open the Android SDK Manager by running the following command C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Android\sdk\tools\android.BAT, selected and installed android-22.

After I installed the required version of Android SDK, I re-opened the Ionic Lab again and pressed build for my project, after which I got the message that my application was successfully built.

Now that my project is being built successfully through Ionic Lab I'm ready to test it out on emulator. I tried running the emulate command in Ionic Lab however it didn't do anything. I then tried to use the ionic emulate android -l command, but this one failed as well. I then opened Android Studio and started one of my previously created AVDs, and tried running the emulate action again from Ionic Lab. This time the app successfully deployed and started on my emulator. You can see below the look of the app when run in the emulator, it is identical to the one that I emulated in the browser.

I believe that it took me slightly longer to run the Ionic Hello World project compared to running the Native Android project, even though I had a lot of the Android SDK already installed from my Getting started with Android tutorial. In the end I ended up with a basic app that isn't very native looking at the moment, and is missing one critical functionality that I got out of the box with Android - the "Navigation Drawer" (i.e. "Burger Menu"). Granted that I didn't look too carefully in [Ionic Marketplace] (https://market.ionic.io/starters), I still think that Native Android gave me a much easier start to the project. After all, I'll now have to go ahead and figure out how to implement the missing "Navigation Drawer", in order to level out the two project stages.