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

Saving our user


The user object we received in response to our firebase.auth().signIn seems like it'll be useful down the line. There may be numerous times we want access to the email of the currently signed-in user. Let's go ahead and save that in the state of our App component so that we can then pass it down to any Container component (once we make more containers).

There are two possible approaches: we can pass up the user object from LoginContainer to App via a callback through props, and App will pass a handleLogin function to LoginContainer as a prop, which will be called when the user logs in and sets the state of App appropriately.

Firebase gives us another option, however. As we discussed earlier, the Firebase database is real-time, which means changes to the data are automatically pushed to the frontend. All we need to do is set up the appropriate listener functions to wait for that change and act on it.

Event listeners

Event listeners in JavaScript essentially work like so: we define...