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

Experiencing the service worker life cycle


The first event that a service worker experiences is the 'install' event. This is when a user first starts up a PWA. The standard user will only experience this once.

To tap into this event, all we have to do is add an event listener to our service worker itself. To do that from within sw.js, we use the self keyword:

self.addEventListener('install', function() {
 console.log('Install!');
});

When you reload the page, you should see 'Install!' appear in the console. In fact, you should see it every time you reload the page, unless you uncheck the Update on reload option under Application | ServiceWorkers. Then, you will only see it the first time.

Next up is the activate event. This event is triggered when the service worker first registers, before the registration completes. In other words, it should occur under the same situations as install, only later:

self.addEventListener('activate', function() {
  console.log('Activate!');
});

The last event we...