Are you a company that relies on technology and wants to stay ahead of the curve? If the answer is yes, one of the most significant trends in app development that you need to embrace is the progressive web app revolution.
Building Progressive Web Apps
A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a regular web page or web application, but it looks, navigates, updates, and interfaces like a native mobile app. In other words, you get a seamless phone app experience but on a web page and they also work offline, much like your native phone apps.
They also have features that make them particularly resilient and adaptable. They work for every user and browser because they have tools for progressive enhancement. They adapt to any device, whether it is a mobile, laptop, tablet, or desktop. They also have other superb app-like features, including push notifications.
A push notification is a message that pops up on your mobile, and you don’t have to be connected to receive these notifications. For example, news updates or the latest movies in Bookmyshow.com use push notifications to send you updates, even when you are offline.
Improved performance, dynamite performance, and faster loading speed make this a technology worth investing in but it is important to look for developers who understand PWAs and use the best tools and frameworks to build them. Forbes, Pinterest, Flipkart, and Ali Express are all examples of PWAs. The PWA is poised to be a technological game-changer.
The Elements of Progressive Web App Development
Many elements go into making a PWA unique and seamless in its performance. The app shell, for instance, stores the content, and there is not much hassle of complex coding. Whenever you launch the app, the content is cached and sent to a user, whether they are online and offline. A PWA works offline because of a service worker, which is installed using an HTTPS server. The service worker’s task is simple – it ensures that the content is either downloaded from the cache or the server. The service worker also has a push manager format ensures that your push notifications work.
Other elements include a JavaScript Object Notation file that helps you create beautiful features and a gorgeous screen with a luminous background and specific caching strategies.
Tools and Frameworks Used for Building Progressive Web Apps
There are so many tools and frameworks to build PWAs. You need to choose technologies that ensure robustness, reliability and a beautiful interface. Other considerations include how engaging the app is and also its security. So which frameworks provide the dynamite combination of beauty and speed? Here are 4 of the best ones in the market.
AngularJS
Undoubtedly the most popular, robust, cutting edge and transformative JavaScript framework for developing PWAs on the client side is the AngularJS. Angular makes it easy for developers to bring in various functionalities to both web and mobile apps. Angular Version 5 and Version 6 are the latest releases, and both have specific PWA support built into them and a slew of new functions to create new PWAs and install superb features. The result? Your PWAs can be downloaded, installed and used just like a mobile app. Angular even supports other cross-platform frameworks like Iconic, so it is pretty much the gold standard for web and mobile app development.
There are even two new CLI commands that help developers turn any project into a PWA. The specific advantage of Angular? It can handle vast amounts of data, so if you have a scalable project, then this is the framework to use.
ReactJS
Maintained by Facebook and other independent developers and organizations, ReactJS is a JavaScript library that you use for creating UI for PWAs and for rendering its UI components. There are many benefits to using ReactJS. You can reuse code, and this saves you time and effort. Also, SEO is tricky when it comes to single page applications and PWAs but not with React. ReactJS has its rendering mechanism, from the server to the browser and due to this, it also improves SEO. It is also significantly easier to use for developers.
Ionic
Another enormously popular and successful tool to build PWAs is the MIT licensed framework, Ionic. This open-source hybrid tool helps developers manipulate the code structure to come up with various features and improvisations to the PWA they wish to create. A client-side framework that combines JavaScript, HTML and CSS3, another considerable advantage of Ionic is that it has a common codebase and this ensures that it can work on any OS. This year, SDK Ionic released version 4 of its framework, and the new version is less dependent on Angular, also offering support for diverse developers and PWAs. The new version includes almost 100 pre-built components that both PWAs and other apps can use.
The Ionic framework even uses Cordova plugins for accessing your camera, making your PWA more like a mobile app than ever! The icing on the cake? Ionic is free!
Combining PWAs with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
An AMP is a turbocharged version of a PWA. Simply put, they are web pages. It is an open-source technology produced by the AMP project and helmed by Google. With AMPs, the pages render very quickly, and this makes it incredibly fast and seamless user experience. With AMPs, Google caches the content on a Google URL, and this is the reason for its super-fast speed. Combining PWAs with AMP can turbocharge your user experience and lower load time. There is an especially powerful reason for this. With a PWA, the starting trouble is significant, and their first load is challenged by the Service Worker, which is chugging along on the side to ensure that the content is downloaded from the cache. When you use AMP as an entry point to your PWA, then you are combining the AMP’s instant delivery with the diversity of the PWA’s features.
There is a reason why a PWA is one of the hottest technologies on the planet right now. Google and Microsoft are embracing it in every way. In a world where mobile and web experiences are becoming more and more intuitive and sophisticated, building progressive web apps is the way forward.