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)

Minifying scripts with uglify

Just like CSS, you should also minimize JavaScript files. Just like we used Clean-CSS to minify CSS, you can use uglify to do the same for your JavaScript. Instead of inlining the script, I like to keep it in individual files.

In the past, I would have also bundled multiple script files together. HTTP/2 utilizes request multiplexing to optimize content delivery. By keeping each script in individual files, you can take advantage of long term caching and make small changes without requiring a complete download.

In addition to minimizing the scripts, I am also going to show you how to create unique file names using an MD5 hash on the content. This will allow you to apply a very long caching time without worrying about browser caches retaining stale copies. This technique is advanced and does require some planning and, of course, an intelligent build...