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 2. Getting Started with Webpack

This chapter is all about Webpack: what it is, how to use it, and why we care. However, before we dive into Webpack, I have a confession to make.

We cheated a bit in the last chapter on application setup. There’s one last piece of our folder structure we need to add--the place where our React files will live.

As we discussed in the Dependencies section of the last chapter, one of React’s killer features is the componentization of user interfaces--splitting them up into small chunks of related HTML and JavaScript. For instance, a "Save" button may be one component, sitting inside a form component, next to a Profile Information component, and so on.

The beauty of the component structure is that everything related to a particular piece of the UI sits together (separation of concerns), also, these sections are in brief, readable files. As a developer, you can easily find what you’re looking for by navigating the folder structure, rather than scrolling through...