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

Chapter 11. Chunking JavaScript to Optimize Performance with Webpack

As we discussed in the last chapter, the biggest problem with converting React applications to Progressive Web Apps is React; more specifically, it's the amount of JavaScript that intrinsically comes along with building a modern JavaScript application. Parsing and running that JavaScript is the biggest single bottleneck for Chatastrophe’s performance.

In the last chapter, we took some measures to improve the perceived startup time of our application, by moving content out of our JavaScript and into our index.html. While this is a very effective method of displaying content to the user as quickly as possible, you'll note that we didn't do anything to actually change the size of our JavaScript, or reduce the time it takes to initialize all that React goodness.

Well, now's the time to do something about it. In this chapter, we'll look at how we can split up our JavaScript bundle for faster loading. We'll also introduce a new...