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)

Polyfiling the homescreen experience on iOS and other legacy browsers

A common question developers and business owners ask is how to enable progressive web application features on iOS and older browsers like Internet Explorer. While all features cannot be hacked in these browsers, much of it can.

When the iPhone was released, the initial application model was the web. They created an advanced experience for web apps that included the add to homescreen experience. Unfortunately, they did not make an automatic prompt experience. Who knows how advanced this might be today if developers did not cry out for the native app model.

What we can do is still leverage this capability and use Matteo Spinelli's add to homescreen library (http://cubiq.org/add-to-home-screen) in combination with Apple's guidelines. Doing so allows your web apps to launch from user's home screens...