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 8. Using a Service Worker to Send Push Notifications

In this chapter, we will complete our application's process for sending push notifications. The implementation is a little complicated; it requires many moving pieces to get things working (in my experience, this is true of any push notifications implementation, on mobile or web). The exciting part is that we get to interact with a lot of new areas of knowledge, such as Device tokens and Cloud functions.

Before we begin, let's take a minute to outline the process for setting up push notifications. As of now, we have our messaging service worker up and running. This service worker will sit there and wait to be called with a new notification. Once that happens, it'll handle everything to do with displaying that notification, so we don't have to worry about that (at least).

What is up to us is sending that message to the service worker. Let's say that we have 1,000 users for our application, each with one unique device. Each device...