Creating Offline and ‘Instant’ Websites – aka Progressive Web Apps

Progresssive Web Apps

The term Progressive Web Apps can be misleading, implying some framework/library or special architecture. In reality, PWAs are regular websites that use HTML5 APIs to create offline sites that have near instant speed. Anything less than 100ms is deemed ‘instant’ by the brain.

Using HTML5’s Cache API, we can effectively create a local web server on the user’s device hosting web pages. With IndexedDB, we have a powerful asynchronous database in the browser. In this way, we can have a ‘local’ deployment of our site.

The magic comes alive with Service Workers… JavaScript files that can intercept network requests and serve pages either from the cache or the network. Service Workers also connect the website with the OS, enabling us to implement many of the features of mobile apps. Google’s Project Fugu has as its mission to enable a PWA to be able to do everything that a mobile app can.

In this talk, we will work with a repo site both locally and live on the Internet so that we can see how this is achieved… breaking and repairing the site as we developers learn best. It is a generic boilerplate for PWAs and can therefore form the basis for you to add offline/instant capability to your existing sites.

All resources and additional links to course videos will be available to attendees.

BIO:

Craig is a trainer/developer of PWAs, Web Components, RxJS and GraphQL with a strong emphasis on databases. He currently provides training courses for NDC and is a regular volunteer tutor at CodeYourFuture.io. https://github.com/iwswordpress/

You can grab your ticket here.