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)

Testing the add to homescreen experience in Chrome

The developer experience would not be complete without the ability to test the add to homescreen experience. Chrome has added tooling which allows you to see how your web manifest file is interpreted and manually trigger the prompt.

Launch Chrome's developer tools by using F12 and select the Application tab. There are many choices to help you debug various aspects of a progressive web application. Under Application, there is a Manifest choice. This will display the properties of your web manifest file, including each icon. This is a quick way for you to determine if your manifest is interpreted correctly, as you can see in the following screenshot:

There is also a link to manually trigger the Add to Home Screen experience. Check out the following screenshot:

Clicking the link in the developer tools will trigger the Add...