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)

Pages on pages

Luckily, saner heads prevail and the head product designer (the highest ranked of the five designers now employed by the company) says that they need only three views for the prototype: the login view (done!), the main chat view, and the user profile view.

Still, we clearly need a robust and extensible way to move between different screens in our app. We need a good solid routing solution.

Traditionally, routing has been a question of which HTML/CSS/JavaScript files are served up. You hit the URL at static-site.com and get the main index.html, then go to static-site.com/resources and get the resources.html.

In this model, the server gets a request for a certain URL and returns the appropriate files.

Increasingly, however, routing is moving to the client side. In a React world, we only ever serve up our index.html and bundle.js. Our JavaScript takes in the URL from...