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 (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

What is a React component?


A React component, at the most basic level, is a piece of the user interface, more specifically, a section of UI devoted to a single purpose.

With React, your UI is split up into sections, sections within those sections, then sections within those, and so on; you get the picture. Each section is its own component, and lives in a separate file.

The beauty of this system may not be obvious now, but once we dive into it, you'll see how it makes our application much more comprehendible, that is, easy for us to understand and navigate as we're developing. We'll only be building a small application with a few components. The effect increases as your application grows to hundreds of components.

Let's look at a quick example of splitting a UI into components. Here's the online store of Packt, the publishers of this book:

If we were to rebuild this in React, we would start by dividing the UI into meaningful sections. Which parts are concerned with different purposes?

Note that...