Book Image

Progressive Web Apps with React

By : Domes
Book Image

Progressive Web Apps with React

By: 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 (15 chapters)

PageSpeed Insights


The Performance Tools are great in that they let us dive deep into the nitty gritty of our application's loading. We will use them to keep track of our app's performance as we try to improve it, but, if we want more specific, detailed suggestions, we can turn to PageSpeed Insights, a tool provided by Google.

Go to PageSpeed Insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) and plug in the URL of your deployed application. After a few seconds, you'll get recommendations about what can we improve about Chatastrophe:

As you can see, our mobile performance is in dire need of aid. Most of the insights focus on our render-blocking JavaScript and CSS. I encourage you to read through their descriptions of these problems and try fixing them on your own. In the next section, we'll work on improving our app to Google's specifications, using another Progressive Web App secret weapon--the app shell pattern.