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)

Creating a service worker shell

In Chapter 1, Introduction to Progressive Web Apps, we created a basic service worker that pre-cached the 2048 game assets. In this and the following chapters, we will dive deeper into the details of a service worker.

The service worker goes through several stages in its overall life cycle. A service worker is registered. Once the script is loaded, it triggers the ‘install’ event. At this point, the service worker is not in control of the client (browser tab).

When the service worker is cleared to control client contexts, the activate event is triggered. After this, the service worker is fully active and in control of any active clients, be they tabs or background processes.

Proper service workers take advantage of the event life cycle to manage data, like cached responses, to set the service worker context.

The podcast application...