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)

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As the preceding introduction explains, we have a lot of functionality to create in this chapter. In order to keep it all in one place, without cluttering up our App.js, we will create a separate JavaScript class to manage everything to do with notifications. This is a pattern I really like with React, to extract functionality not attached to any one component. In our src/ folder, next to our components folder, let's create a folder called resources, and within that, a file called NotificationResource.js.

The basic outline of our class looks like this:

export default class NotificationResource {

}

We create a JavaScript class and export it.

Note

For those unfamiliar with JavaScript classes (especially for those familiar with classes in other languages), I encourage you to read the MDN article explaining the basics, at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Classes.

Let’s import it in our App.js before we forget:

import NotificationResource from...