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

Testing our cache


Run your app locally quickly with yarn start to check for any obvious errors (typos and such), and if all looks good, fire up yarn deploy.

Open your live application and the Chrome DevTools. Turn off Update on reload under Application | Service Workers, refresh once, and then go to the Network tab. You should see something like the following:

Note

If this doesn't work, try Unregistering any service workers under Application | Service Workers, and then reload twice.

The key point is (from service worker) beside our JavaScript files. Our static assets are being served up by our service worker cache, and if you scroll to the top of the network tab, you'll see this:

The document itself is being served from the service worker, which means we can run our app under any network condition, even offline; let's try it. Click on the Offline checkbox at the top of the Network tab, and click on reload.

If all goes well, there should be no difference between our application's load time, even...