Progressive Web Applications
In this chapter, we will see the next evolutionary step for web applications: progressive web applications (PWAs). This term may not seem descriptive enough, but it refers to a group of technologies that create the general concept and can be implemented gradually or partially. The basic idea behind it is to bring a web application out of the context of the browser and implement it in any type of device, to act and behave as much as possible to a native application. This is done thanks to the implementation of new APIs in the browser engines, as well as integrations among the most popular operating systems for desktop and mobile devices. The starting point for a PWA is, of course, a single-page application (SPA).
By the end of this chapter, we will have learned the following:
- What makes a SPA a PWA, and which technologies are involved
- How to implement manually a responsive SPA, manifest file, service workers, offline storage, and so on ...