Ionic has released its seventh major version, offering several innovations for developers using Ionic Angular, Ionic React and Ionic Vue. Some notable features of Ionic 7 include increased tab performance, new declarative overlay functionality and revised Vite support.
The development team has announced that the performance of the platform has increased by 70% when switching between tabs for Ionic React and Ionic Vue. Ionic Angular can also benefit from faster component initialization, thanks to optimizations in Stencil, a compiler for web components.
The new release also allows data to be passed as a property on the component instance without using a controller, making it easier to use packages with the Vite build tool and Vitest testing framework.
Ionic 7 brings the ability to use the modal and popover components declaratively within application templates for all overlay components, such as Action Sheet, Alert, Loading, Picker and Toast. The development team has added isOpen and trigger properties to reduce the amount of code required to present and discard these overlays.
Finally, for form controls like Toggle or Input, Ionic 7 offers a simplified syntax, eliminating the need for the item and label components, ion-item and ion-label. This aims to improve compatibility with assistive technologies and reduce boilerplate code while clarifying the intent of form component APIs.
The new syntax is backward compatible, and a migration guide is available for developers upgrading from Ionic 6 to Ionic 7. Ionic 7 promises to offer several advantages for developers, making it easier and more efficient to create mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
