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 13. Auditing Our App

Auditing is a way of confirming that our Progressive Web App is a true PWA, that it lives up to the standards of the name. This audit is an important last step for us to check our work and ensure that our app is as good as it can be in terms of PWA functionality.

As mentioned previously, the biggest champion of Progressive Web Apps is Google. Not only are their Chrome browser and Android operating systems the most PWA-friendly of all, Google puts a great deal of effort into educating developers on how and why to build a PWA. As you move forward (beyond this book) into the world of the PWA, you'll probably often turn to their documentation.

However, Google provides another way to light the way forward to the progressive web. To ensure the quality of your web page or application, they have released a set of tools to measure your site against a set criteria. The main tool they use to do so is called Lighthouse.

Here's what we'll cover in this chapter:

  • What is Lighthouse...