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)

Evaluating the readout

If your results don't match the preceding, there are two possibilities:

  • Chrome has added a new test that our app does not fulfill. As we've mentioned many times, PWAs are an evolving technology, so this is certainly possible.
  • You missed some step in the book; happens to the best of us.

In either case, I encourage you to investigate and try to solve the root issue. Google provides documentation for every test criteria, which is a good place to start.

In our case, the only test we didn't pass with flying colors was Performance. Let's look at the reason we didn't:

As we see here, our first meaningful paint takes about three seconds. Note that our app shell is not considered a meaningful paint, though it does improve the perceived performance of the page. Chrome is smart enough to know that it is not until our login form or chat container...