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 PRPL pattern


In the last chapter, we introduced some basic principles for performative apps. You want your user to spend as little time as possible waiting, which means loading the essentials as fast as possible and deferring loading the rest of the application to "idle" time for the processor.

These two concepts form the 'I' and 'L' of the RAIL metric. We took a step toward improving the 'L' with the concept of the app shell. Now, we will move some of our 'L' (the initial load) into the 'I' (the idle time of our application) but, before we do that, let's introduce another acronym.

PRPL stands for Push, Render, Pre-cache, Lazy-load; it's a step-by-step process for how an ideal application should get the content it needs from the server.

Before we dive in, however, I would like to caution the reader that the PRPL pattern is relatively new at the time of writing and may evolve quickly as Progressive Web Apps move into the mainstream. Like many of the concepts we've discussed in this book...