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)

The Chrome improved add to homescreen experience

Some time in 2017, the Chrome team announced changes to the PWA installation experience called the improved add to homescreen experience. At the time, it was not as much about the automatic prompt, but that has been part of the change. It has more to do with how PWAs behave on Android and that it is more like a native application.

These changes were multifaceted and start with the web manifest scope property. This property is relatively new but allows the browser to know how to limit PWA functionality on an origin (domain name).

When you set the scope value to /, you are telling the platform that the progressive web application's capabilities apply to all paths within the origin. This may not always be the case, especially on larger sites and enterprise applications. Often, these sites are segmented into different applications...