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

Stretch goals


Chatastrophe is up and running, but it’s still quite basic. We'll now discuss a few challenges, which you should choose to accept, to stretch your skills and improve our app.

Switch to Preact

Preact is a 3 KB version of the React library. It has a similar API and functionality, without the bulk. Using it instead of React will improve our app’s performance. If you do go down this route, look into Webpack aliases as a way of streamlining the conversion.

https://github.com/developit/preact

Show online status

Tell other users when another user is online. The UI is up to you.

Show when typing

A common feature in chat rooms, it is used to give your users an indication that someone else is typing. With Chatastrophe, the challenge will be representing multiple users typing at once.

Include file upload

People want to share with their friends (probably memes). Give them a way to do so with a file uploading system.

Create chat rooms

Your friend had a vision of a truly global chat room; that vision...