Imagine you have a client who would want his users to access certain pages of their website without the use of the internet, peradventure some users are contractors who work at remote sites that do not have access to the internet and he definitely wants it to be a website hmm now that's a tough one or say you want to improve user experience by delivering pages faster and in so doing you want to prevent request from constantly hitting your http servers.
Well all that can be solved using PWAS. Progressive Web Apps are website that can be accessed without internet connection and can also be installed as though they are a native application on your desktop or mobile device by simply accepting a push notification sent to you.
These websites are then accessible with the help of certain technologies offline but before that can be achieved, you would have to have visited the site at least once with internet connectivity. There are various technologies that helps your website become Progressive, and we will treat them accordingly. Firstly you will need service workers.
Now let's talk a little on service workers. As a developer you might have come across service workers before, they are scripts that run at the background of your website separate from your webpages. These scripts help perform certain operations such as push notifications, background sync, caching which is used in PWAs etc.
Now let's talk about Lighthouse, an open source tool provide by Google that shows you the metrics of how "PWAish" your site is this tool helps you test if your site has fully reached a PWA acceptance level which means users would be able to access your site. Less I skip, in order to use service workers, you register it on your website by including it in your index.html file. Next thing you do is create a file which will have most of the service workers methods.
This file helps you provide the pages you would like to cache so they can work offline. Next thing you can do which is optional but also important is create a manifest.json file. For most mobile developers they will be familiar with this file. This file helps make the website downloadable, creating a setup with an icon depending on your device.
Next you can do is setup push notifications, this just helps in notifying users of your site of certain events are actions just like how you will get notified on your Twitter app that someone has liked your post. Remember push notifications is different from local notification which is dependent locally on the app if it's open. In summary, PWAs tools help you cache pages of your app so they can be served locally without always hitting back at your server.
This would help user experience as it not only serves your pages faster, but also helps your users have Access to pages in your site without connection to the internet. You can jump right in and create your first PWA app by following this link https://t.co/eFDi9K81ML?amp=1
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