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)

Service worker templating

A concept you should embrace about service workers is that they can act like a web server in the browser. Traditionally, web servers have used runtime rendering platforms, such as ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla!. These systems are rendering engines more than anything else. You can perform HTML rendering inside of a service worker.

Single-page applications have become very popular this decade. They effectively take ownership of this rendering process from the server. Today, it is popular to preload application templates, whether you're using mustache, handlebars, or larger frameworks such as Angular and React. All of these are essentially just HTML rendering systems. The difference between the server side and the client side is where the rendering takes place. Because you can intercept...