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

Example applications


Want to see what a real live PWA looks like? Check out any of the following. A few also contain links to GitHub for you to view the source code.

PWA.rocks

A collection of Progressive Web Apps and source for most of the following. If you ever need inspiration, make this your first stop. I also encourage you to add any PWAs you add to the list.

https://pwa.rocks/

Flipboard

One of the biggest players in the PWA space, Flipboard's PWA is slim, fast, and beautiful. Flipboard has a full-featured native application, but also a PWA in order to hedge their bets in terms of user preference. If the content-heavy Flipboard can manage the performance guidelines of PWAs, the sky is the limit.

https://flipboard.com/

React Hacker News

The ever-popular developer project: a clone of Hacker News, here using React. As an open source project, ReactHN is a great way to look into how to manage a complex frontend library with Progressive Web App fundamentals. Our good friend Addy Osmani is at work...