In the past couple of months I've been reading quite a lot about Progressive Web Apps. The term is getting very popular especially due to Google's effort and investment in the concept.
What is a Progressive Web App?
I kind of like Ada Rose Edwards definition: "A website so good you want to save it on your home screen".
According to Google, a Progressive Web App is "a website or web application that is reliable, fast and engaging". Lets break down those 3 pillars:
Reliable: this is mostly about using Service Workers and enabling offline with the use of cache control and managing requests when connection is unstable.
Fast: we all know thats users leave websites if they take too long to load. Google is putting a lot of emphasis on performance these days and I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes part of its indexing algorithm.
Engaging: basically, the features that make a website look more like a native app - being installable, work on full screen, make use of push notifications.
Being Progressive
There is a focus on the new technologies like Service Workers and the Push API, but being progressive means catering for legacy browsers too. This is the basic idea of progressive enhancement which we know and have been using for ages.
Where to start?
The Google Developer Team has been putting a lot of effort in this field, especially since their Summit last September.
They also have a very deep and beginner friendly portal with loads of articles and tutorials on the subject: https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/
Smashing Magazine, as always, has done the same and came up with a great article written by Kevin Farrugia on building PWAs: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/08/a-beginners-guide-to-progressive-web-apps/
My PWA on github
I've also being playing around with these concepts and build a very simple page to practise. You can have a look at the source code on github: https://github.com/jpedroribeiro/VoucherWallet