Book Image

Progressive Web Application Development by Example

By : Chris Love
Book Image

Progressive Web Application Development by Example

By: Chris Love

Overview of this book

Are you a developer that wants to create truly cross-platform user experiences with a minimal footprint, free of store restrictions and features customers want? Then you need to get to grips with Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), a perfect amalgamation of web and mobile applications with a blazing-fast response time. Progressive Web Application Development by Example helps you explore concepts of the PWA development by enabling you to develop three projects, starting with a 2048 game. In this game, you will review parts of a web manifest file and understand how a browser uses properties to define the home screen experience. You will then move on to learning how to develop and use a podcast client and be introduced to service workers. The application will demonstrate how service workers are registered and updated. In addition to this, you will review a caching API so that you have a firm understanding of how to use the cache within a service worker, and you'll discover core caching strategies and how to code them within a service worker. Finally, you will study how to build a tickets application, wherein you’ll apply advanced service worker techniques, such as cache invalidation. Also, you'll learn about tools you can use to validate your applications and scaffold them for quality and consistency. By the end of the book, you will have walked through browser developer tools, node modules, and online tools for creating high-quality PWAs.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we saw how the Fetch and Cache APIs are critical for the service workers. To get the most out of service workers, you need to be able to intercept and manipulate requests and the server responses. Because service workers rely on asynchronous functions (Promises), you must use Fetch, as a new replacement for XMLHttpRequest.

The Cache API provides a new storage medium in the browser, which is highly specialized for request/response pairs. The API is a rich platform, providing the maximum amount of control over network resources.

Your goal is to use the best logic and platform resources to make your website load quickly and work offline. Now that you know how the Fetch and Cache APIs work, it's time to start crafting the best caching system you can.

In the next chapter, we will review different caching patterns and start seeing how they can be applied...