Welcome to our first big step into the world of Progressive Web Applications. This chapter will be devoted to creating our first service worker which, in turn, will unlock much of the functionality that makes PWAs so special.
We’ve talked previously about PWAs bridging web apps and native applications. The way they do this is through service workers. Service workers make things such as push notifications and offline access possible. They're an exciting new technology with many applications (more and more emerging each year); if one piece of tech will transform web development in the next five years, it's service workers.
However, enough hype; let's dive in to what exactly a service worker is.
In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:
- What is a service worker?
- The service worker life cycle
- How to register a service worker...
