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

Making our app installable - Android


Google is one of the biggest proponents of PWA's, so it makes sense that their Chrome browser and Android operating system are the most friendly to web app manifests.

Let's go through the process of creating a manifest in a way that makes it work with the latest version of Chrome. Later in this chapter, we'll go through the same process in a more manual way in order to support iOS.

Manifest properties

Let’s get to it! In your public/ folder, create a file called manifest.json, and then add an empty object. Each of the following will be a key-value pair of that object. We'll take a quick tour through each of the available properties:

  • name: Your application's name. Simple!:
"name": "Chatastrophe",
  • short_name: A human readable version of your application's name. This is for times when the full name won't fit, like on your user's home screen. If your app's name is "Why PWAs Are Great For Everyone", you can shorten it to "PWAs R Great" or something here:
“short_name...