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)

Using the JSON server for an API

When you build modern applications, the frontend almost always communicates with an API to interact with a date source. The API is the gateway to the backend application and can be consumed by any client application, such as a Progressive Web App.

Developing against an API can be rather tricky when you don't want to develop the entire API first. In the podcast application, we simply loaded a pre-rendered JSON to simulate an API. The podcast application only made a GET request and did not do any post requests or attempts to update the underlying data model.

The PWA ticket application does make post requests and attempts to update the underlying data model, but rather than building out an entire infrastructure for this, I found a nice solution: json-server (https://github.com/typicode/json-server). This is a node module that works much like...