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

Chapter 7. Adding a Service Worker

Welcome to our first big step into the world of Progressive Web Applications. This chapter will be devoted to creating our first service worker which, in turn, will unlock much of the functionality that makes PWAs so special.

We’ve talked previously about PWAs bridging web apps and native applications. The way they do this is through service workers. Service workers make things such as push notifications and offline access possible. They're an exciting new technology with many applications (more and more emerging each year); if one piece of tech will transform web development in the next five years, it's service workers.

However, enough hype; let's dive in to what exactly a service worker is.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

  • What is a service worker?
  • The service worker life cycle
  • How to register a service worker on our page