Book Image

Progressive Web Apps with React

By : Scott Domes
Book Image

Progressive Web Apps with React

By: Scott Domes

Overview of this book

For years, the speed and power of web apps has lagged behind native applications. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) aim to solve this by bridging the gap between the web apps and native apps, delivering a host of exciting features. Simultaneously, React is fast becoming the go-to solution for building modern web UIs, combining ease of development with performance and capability. Using React alongside PWA technology will make it easy for you to build a fast, beautiful, and functional web app. After an introduction and brief overview of the goals of PWAs, the book moves on to setting up the application structure. From there, it covers the Webpack build process and the process of creating React components. You'll learn how to set up the backend database and authentication solution to communicate with Firebase and how to work with React Router. Next, you will create and configure your web app manifest, making your PWA installable on mobile devices. Then you'll get introduced to service workers and see how they work as we configure the app to send push notifications using Firebase Cloud Messaging. We'll also explore the App Shell pattern, a key concept in PWAs and look at its advantages regarding efficient performance. Finally, you'll learn how to add of?ine capabilities to the app with caching and confirm your progress by auditing your PWA with Lighthouse. Also, you'll discover helper libraries and shortcuts that will help you save time and understand the future of PWA development.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 10. The App Shell

Our last chapter was about adding home screen installation and push notifications--both meant to improve the user's experience by adding functionality--but, as we described in our user stories at the beginning of the book, one of the most important features of this app was its inclusiveness; it was a chat app for everyone, anyone, anywhere.

From a web app perspective, we can better rephrase that as "any connection, any speed." The biggest blocker of web application performance is network requests: how long it takes to load data over a poor connection.

Developers can fail to give performance its due attention, simply because we usually test our sites on speedy connections inside air-conditioned buildings in urban hubs. However, for a global app such as Chatastrophe, we must think about the users in less developed countries, the users in rural areas, and the users who only have a tenth of the network speed we do. How can we make the app work for them?

This section is...