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)

Our ChatContainer


Creating a component should be old news by now. Our ChatContainer will be a class-based component, since we’ll need to tap into some lifecycle methods down the line (more on that later).

Inside our components folder, create a file called ChatContainer.js. Then, set up our skeleton:

import React, { Component } from 'react';

export default class ChatContainer extends Component {
  render() {
    return (

   );
  }
}

Let's continue our pattern of wrapping our component in a div with an id of the component name:

import React, { Component } from 'react';

export default class ChatContainer extends Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <div id="ChatContainer">
      </div>
    );
  }
}

Just as at the top of our LoginContainer, we will want to render our beautiful logo and title for our user to see. If only we had some sort of reuseable component so that we didn't have to rewrite that code:

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import Header from './Header';...