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

The app shell pattern


The essence of our application is the message list and chat box, where users read and write messages.

This core functionality relies on JavaScript to work. We cannot get around the fact that we are unable to display the messages until the user has been authenticated through Firebase and the messages array has loaded, but everything surrounding those two pieces is mostly static content. It's the same in every view and it does not rely on JavaScript to work:

We can refer to this as the application shell--the frame around the functional, JavaScript driven core.

Since this frame does not rely on JavaScript to function, there's actually no need for us to wait for React to load and boot up all our JavaScript before displaying it—which is what is currently happening.

Right now, our shell is a part of our React code, so, all our JavaScript has to be loaded before we call ReactDOM.render and display it on the screen.

However, with our app, and with many apps, there’s a significant...