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)

User stories progress

Let's briefly check in with the user stories we defined in Chapter 1, Creating Our App Structure, and see which ones we have already accomplished.

We've completed the following:

Users should be able to log in and out of the application.

The following are unfinished, but are part of the PWA functionality we'll build later:

  • Users should be able to view their messages even when offline
  • Users should receive push notifications when a message is sent by another user
  • Users should be able to install the app to their mobile device
  • Users should be able to load the app in under five seconds, even under shaky network conditions

That leaves us with a list of stories we need to complete before our prototype is complete:

  • Users should be able to send and receive messages in real time
  • Users should be able to view all messages by a given author

Each of these...