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 9. Making Our App Installable with a Manifest

We’re now starting down the road to Progressive Web App land. From now on, our only focus will be on taking our existing application and making it faster, sleeker, and more user-friendly.

One of the big advantages of the Progressive Web App is bridging the gap between a web application (viewed in a browser) and a native app (launched as a separate application). The next few chapters, in particular, will focus on making our web app more native-like, without losing all the advantages of a web application.

The first major benefit of a web application over a native app is the lack of an install barrier. If you create a native app, you need to convince users to devote precious storage and bandwidth, before they even use your application. They must be willing to sit through the download and install process. Then they have to keep it around, even if they don't use it that often.

Web applications have no such barrier. You can use them almost instantly...