PWA! The Newest Web Technology!

Progressive Web App (PWA) is probably the most important technique in web development in 2019. Today we are going to talk about what is the progressive web app and why you should use this technique in your next project.

What is the progressive web app (PWA) ?

PWA is an ordinary website that has special techniques that make this website powerful; like acting as a native app and also the ability to work offline without internet access, and nowadays it’s available to access device hardware on deeper level depending on APis offering capabilities like push notifications, access camera, etc... you can read more on what web can do today and how PWA competes nowadays with native apps, as it gives the end-user app-like experiences !

What is power of PWA and how it’s will improve your website?

As i mentioned before PWA provides websites with special features like working offline, caching using local storage and indexedDB and here is a list of other special features:

• Responsive: To fit any form factor

• Connectivity independent: Progressively-enhanced with service workers to let them work offline.

• App-like-interactions: Adopt a Shell + content application model to create appy navigations & interactions

• Fresh: Transparently always up-to-date thanks to the service worker update process

• Safe: Served via TLS (a Service Worker requirement) to prevent snooping

• Discoverable: Identifiable as “applications” thanks to W3C manifests and service worker registration scope allowing search engines to find them.

• Re-engageable: Can access the re-engagement UIs of the OS; e.g. push notifications

• Installable: to the home screen through browser-provided prompts, allowing users to “keep” apps they find most useful without the hassle of an app store

• Linkable: meaning they’re zero-friction, zero-install, and easy to share. The social power of URLs matters.

The Baseline

The Baseline must exist in your website and be configured to make your website super awesome with SPA standards (we will talk about how to configure it later) so you can check the references below to know how you can deal with this standards.

• HTTPS

• Web App Manifest

• Service Worker

How to check if your website is a PWA?

Google provides lighthouse Chrome extension to scan your website that will create full report about your website status to check your performance, seo and best practice.

So let us now go through the steps of scanning your website:

1. Go to chrome store to install lighthouse extension.

2. Press add to chrome.

3. Navigate to your website, then Click Lighthouse . It should be next to the Chrome address bar. If not, open Chrome's main menu and access it at the top of the menu. After clicking, the Lighthouse menu expands.

4. Then it will generate a full report  in details with how to fix this.

5. If you note the last icon on the right side named “Progressive web app”:

• In case your website is progressive will see icon like this

• If  not you will see following icon, in this case click on icon to check what’s wrong with your website.

How to get started with PWA?

In this article we have talked about PWA, what it is, and its features .In  addition to that, we added some references to help you on how to start. In the next article we will create a small project showing how to implement PWA techniques and SPA (Single page application) 

See you next time!