Book Image

Progressive Web Application Development by Example

By : Chris Love
Book Image

Progressive Web Application Development by Example

By: Chris Love

Overview of this book

Are you a developer that wants to create truly cross-platform user experiences with a minimal footprint, free of store restrictions and features customers want? Then you need to get to grips with Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), a perfect amalgamation of web and mobile applications with a blazing-fast response time. Progressive Web Application Development by Example helps you explore concepts of the PWA development by enabling you to develop three projects, starting with a 2048 game. In this game, you will review parts of a web manifest file and understand how a browser uses properties to define the home screen experience. You will then move on to learning how to develop and use a podcast client and be introduced to service workers. The application will demonstrate how service workers are registered and updated. In addition to this, you will review a caching API so that you have a firm understanding of how to use the cache within a service worker, and you'll discover core caching strategies and how to code them within a service worker. Finally, you will study how to build a tickets application, wherein you’ll apply advanced service worker techniques, such as cache invalidation. Also, you'll learn about tools you can use to validate your applications and scaffold them for quality and consistency. By the end of the book, you will have walked through browser developer tools, node modules, and online tools for creating high-quality PWAs.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Making complex service workers with workbox

Workbox (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/workbox/) is another open source project to help you create service workers. It is maintained by the Chrome team, but like the other projects, I have reviewed those open to public contributions.

The goal of Workbox is to help scaffold complete service workers or add complex components to existing service workers. Workbox allows you to build on a solid foundation, so you can configure to meet your specific needs. It gives you control over how you build your service worker. You can manually add features to existing service workers and tooling to scaffold a service worker from scratch.

A properly configured service worker uses a combination of appropriate caching strategies. The key part of that sentence is a properly configured service worker, which is, as you should know by now, not simple...