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

Registering our first service worker


Remember the distinction about service workers--they are a piece of our site, but run outside our application code. With that in mind, our service worker will live inside public/ folder, and not in src/ folder.

Then, create a file called sw.js in your public/ folder. We'll keep it simple for now; just add a single console.log inside:

console.log("Service worker running!");

The real work (registering the service worker) will be done inside our index.html. For this process, we want to do the following:

  1. Check whether the browser supports service workers.
  2. Wait for the page to load.
  3. Register the service worker.
  4. Log out the result.

Let's move through the steps one by one. First, let's create an empty script tag below our Firebase initialization, inside public/index.html:

<body>
  <div id="root"></div>
  <script src="/secrets.js"></script>
  <script src="https://www.gstatic.com/firebasejs/4.1.2/firebase.js"></script>
  <script...