Book Image

Progressive Web Application Development by Example

By : Love
Book Image

Progressive Web Application Development by Example

By: 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)

The add to homescreen experience

The emergence of an automatic prompt to a visitor to add your progressive web app to their homescreen is exciting. In the past, Chrome would eventually display a prompt to install a progressive web app, but that has changed recently. The rules determining when the prompt triggers are still valid, but now only trigger the beforeinstallprompt event.

How the user prompt triggers is where each browser can choose a different path. Some of the requirements are defined in the web manifest specification, but the experience is left open ended for browsers to implement as they see fit.

Right now, Chrome has the most mature process. They established the following criteria to automatically trigger the add to homescreen experience:

  • Has a web app manifest file with:
    • A short_name (used on the homescreen)
    • A name (used in the banner)
    • A 144 x 144 .png icon (the...