Best ways to build Progressive Web App

2019, Sep 17

Progressive websites are rapidly growing in popularity and it is a hot topic in software development since the last couple of years. And reason for this can be explained easily.

  • It can give feelings of both native and web applications. Means, by developing a single code base, application can work with most browsers and devices (mobile and desktop).
  • Leverage service workers to enable offline connectivity. For this we need to have HTTPS.
  • We can have push notification functionality in our PWA.

You must go through this article from google before getting started with PWA.

I am assuming that you are having a basic knowledge on PWA and looking for good technologies and tools.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. Progressive web app with React.js
  2. How polymer can help in building PWA
  3. Progressive web app with Angular
  4. Tools to check quality and performance
  5. Conclusion

Progressing Web App with React

React is an UI library backed by facebook. You can create simple, small and reusable UI components by using JavaScript/TypeScript and share it across the application. It is very very useful in simplifying the complex UI.

react

Facebook is using more than 30,000 react components. Also you can check create-react-app, it automatically generates all the required data for your PWA and all you need to do is only customize it.

Progressive Web App with Polymer

Polymer is developed by Google, it is a lightweight JavaScript framework. It enables mobile developers to create reusable elements that facilitate synchronizing data with devices. The Polymer library works in all major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge, Safari, and Opera.

polymer

You can use pwa-starter-kit. It is built using the PRPL pattern, which is a new approach for structuring and serving PWAs. It ensure the loading performance.

  • Push critical resources for the initial URL route(uses HTTP2).
  • Render initial route. Each route only load exactly what it needs.
  • Pre-cache remaining routes.
  • Lazy-load and create remaining routes on demand.

Progressive Web App with Angular

Angular is a framework for developing the UI. The arrival of Angular 5 has brought developers a simpler way to create PWA. Angular 5 is now equipped with a powerful service worker for built-in PWA support. The latest version of this framework has several new features for creating responsive and reliable PWA.

Angular

This tool enables scalability for a project, so your app can now manage a big scope of data. New CLI commands allow developers to easily turn projects into a PWAs.

You can also check ionic and AMP. These are the best libraries/frameworks to develop PWA.

Quality and performance checking

To check the quality and performance of the PWA, Google has created an open-source automated tool, called Lighthouse. This tool tells you if your web app is ready to become a PWA. When you add your website to this application, Lighthouse measures it on its four criteria’s and shows problems that you should solve to increase the efficiency of your web app.

Conclusion

These smart tools/frameworks/libraries are making life easy for the developers. You can choose any of the framework/library from above on basis of your requirements.

PWAweb