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

Our project structure


Let’s see what this looks like in practice. In our chatastrophe project folder, create an src folder (which should be next to the public and node_modules folder in the root of the project folder).

The src folder is where all our React files will live. To illustrate what this will look like, let’s create some mock files.

Inside src, make another folder, called components. Inside that folder, let's make three JavaScript files. You can name them whatever you like, but for example purposes, I’ll call them Component1.js, Component2.js, and Component3.js.

Imagine that each of these component files holds a bit of our user interface. We need all three files to construct a complete UI. How do we import them all?

Well, we can do what we’ve done so far when we needed to use JavaScript files. We can create a script tag for each component in our index.html. That’s the brute force way.

However, as our application grows, this approach will quickly become unwieldy. An application such as...