Progressive Web Apps: Enhancing Your Web Apps Using Service Workers
Published by Pearson
Enhancing Your Web Apps Using Service Workers
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are the bright future of desktop and mobile applications. There are different ways to look at PWAs, but in general they’re interactive web applications built using specific browser capabilities that enable the web apps to work and act more like native apps. Research firm Gartner was so confident in the growth of PWAs that they predicted that 50% of all consumer apps would be PWAs this year. Many of the web applications you currently use are most likely PWAs with Google releasing Gmail as a PWA and Microsoft delivering both Outlook and OneDrive as PWAs this year.
In this fast-paced session chock full of technical details, you’ll learn how build your own progressive web applications. You’ll learn how to make your app installable using web app manifests and some JavaScript code. You’ll also learn how to make your web app work in offline mode on compatible browsers using service workers. You’ll also learn about all the ways service workers can enhance the capabilities of a web application.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- How to add a service worker to a web application
- How to add a web app manifest to a web application
- How adding a little bit of JavaScript code to a web application with a web app manifest can enable the user to install the app with just a click
- How to use a service worker to enable a web application to operate while offline
- How to cache different parts of your web application code and content using a service worker, and enable different behavior when online vs. offline
- How to use a service worker to display a custom offline message when opening a web app on a device that has no radio connectivity
- How to use some free tools to automate all of this for you
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a software developer building web applications today and you want to learn how to turbocharge your apps
- You’re a mobile developer who recognizes that delivering a single web application is less expensive than hand crafting native mobile applications for multiple target platforms.
Prerequisites
- Must have experience building web applications using HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Must be a capable JavaScript developer
Course Set-up
- Code editor, recommend Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/)
- nodeJS installed (https://nodejs.org/)
- HTTP Server (recommend https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server or https://www.npmjs.com/package/browser-sync)
- Cloned copy of the course files from https://github.com/johnwargo/pwa-starter-course.
Recommended Follow-up
- Learning Progressive Web Apps (https://www.informit.com/store/learning-progressive-web-apps-9780136484226)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Segment 1: Introduction to Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) Length 20 minutes
Segment 2: Introducing Service Workers Length 20 minutes
Segment 3: Adding a Service Worker to a Web App Length 20 minutes
Break: 5 minutes
Segment 4: Service Worker Lifecycle Events Length 30 minutes
Segment 5: Implement a Simple Offline Caching Strategy Length 30 minutes
Break: 5 minutes
Segment 6: Making a Web Application Installable Length 30 minutes
Segment 7: Automated Tools for Creating PWAs Length 20 minutes
Course wrap-up and next steps
Your Instructor
John Wargo
John is a professional software developer, writer, presenter, father, husband, and Geek. For the last 15 years, he’s focused on enterprise mobility and building mobile apps. He’s an author of 8 books (6 on mobile development), He loves tinkering with IoT, building and writing about projects for Arduino, Particle Photon, Raspberry Pi, and more. He’s currently a Staff Product Manager at GitHub.