Book Image

Progressive Web Apps with React

By : Scott Domes
Book Image

Progressive Web Apps with React

By: Scott Domes

Overview of this book

For years, the speed and power of web apps has lagged behind native applications. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) aim to solve this by bridging the gap between the web apps and native apps, delivering a host of exciting features. Simultaneously, React is fast becoming the go-to solution for building modern web UIs, combining ease of development with performance and capability. Using React alongside PWA technology will make it easy for you to build a fast, beautiful, and functional web app. After an introduction and brief overview of the goals of PWAs, the book moves on to setting up the application structure. From there, it covers the Webpack build process and the process of creating React components. You'll learn how to set up the backend database and authentication solution to communicate with Firebase and how to work with React Router. Next, you will create and configure your web app manifest, making your PWA installable on mobile devices. Then you'll get introduced to service workers and see how they work as we configure the app to send push notifications using Firebase Cloud Messaging. We'll also explore the App Shell pattern, a key concept in PWAs and look at its advantages regarding efficient performance. Finally, you'll learn how to add of?ine capabilities to the app with caching and confirm your progress by auditing your PWA with Lighthouse. Also, you'll discover helper libraries and shortcuts that will help you save time and understand the future of PWA development.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

The dark side of npm


In the past year, npm has come under fire for various reasons.

  • It can be slow (just try installing large packages over a poor Wi-Fi connection)
  • Its installation process can lead to different results for different developers on the same project
  • It doesn't work offline, even if you've downloaded the package before

In response to these issues, Facebook came out with a package manager called Yarn. Yarn is essentially a wrapper around npm, giving the same basic functionality with an extra layer of goodness. Let's go ahead and install it so that we can use it to manage our packages!

Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install for installation instructions. For macOS, note that you'll need Homebrew (which is like npm for macOS packages--packages everywhere!), which you can get at https://brew.sh/.