The development environment that I will use to build an Ionic Mobile application includes the following items:
Visual Studio Community 2015. This is a great way to get the benefits of this IDE without having to pay the premiums. Visual Studio is a robust IDE and with this community edition you can install extensions.
ASP.NET Web API. With my background in C# and ASP.NET choosing this as the back-end REST API makes sense. I will be able to write the REST API fairly quickly. The next post will be on building the back-end REST API using ASP.NET Web API.
Ionic Framework. Also with my background in using this framework at work, I will be able to develop a mobile application in a short amount of time.
Twitter Bootstrap. I’ve used Twitter Bootstrap before for another project and enjoyed using it. It’s simple and easy to use.
RedHat OpenShift Online. This is a relatively new service been around for a several years and the free version allows you to create up to 3 “gears” or applications. Since I’m currently getting started on my personal project it makes sense to use this service for now.
MongoLab. This database service provides a free plan of 500 MB. This will be plenty for my current needs.
Overall, this setup will get me started. Eventually I would want to try building a back-end with Node.js and Express. But for now this setup meets the requirements for my personal projects. The next post will be about building my ASP.NET Web API back-end.