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 Cache API


The mechanism we will use for caching is the Web Cache API.

Note

Note that the Mozilla Developer Network defines the Cache API as experimental technology, and as of August 2017, it only has the support of Chrome, Firefox, and the latest version of Opera.

The API specification has a few quirks we need to talk about. First, you can store multiple cache objects in the cache. In this way, we're able to store multiple versions of our cache, named whatever string we like.

That said, the browser has a limit of how much data it can store from any one site. If the cache gets too full, it may simply delete all data from that origin, so our best bet is to store the bare minimum.

However, there's an additional difficulty. Items in the cache never expire, unless explicitly deleted, so if we keep trying to stuff new cache objects into our cache, eventually it'll get too full and delete everything. Managing, updating, and deleting cache objects is entirely up to us. We have to clean up our own...