Progressive Web Apps: Revolutionizing the Web Development Industry

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) has made a huge splash in the web development industry owing to several progressive features that provide users with mobile app experience. Though, progressive web applications are nothing more than simple web apps, they combine the best of both mobile and the app world. With these apps, you would be able to deliver fast, engaging and consistent experiences while still having the convenience and accessibility of a web page.

Promoted strongly by Google, PWA’s have been adopted by leading market players such as Twitter etc. So, how good are PWA’s? Unlike websites that have to deal with low speed, which tends to become worse with connectivity issues, PWA’s display flawless performance (in terms of user experience) in slow, as well as no connectivity.

According to a study, an average user spends 80% of his total time primarily on three of his apps. 

While other apps might consume significant portion of the memory, there is no such issue with progressive web apps. Apart from this, the cost to develop a mobile app is very high and can turn out to be more intimidating if separate code bases are developed for different platforms.

While there are some native app features that can be used by PWA’s, not all native app features can be used by these web apps. However, given the fact that progressive apps are quickly evolving, it can well be anticipated that these features would soon be part of progressive web apps.

Components of a PWA:

App Manifest: App Manifest is basically a file that defines all the resources that will be required by the app. The file that describes resources such as app icon, displayed names and the screen is basically a JASON file, the links to which is required on every page.  So, when the manifest file in your index.html is linked, browsers will identify and load the resources.

Service Worker:It’s basically a Java script code that acts as a programmable proxy that responds to requests pertaining to network. Since, it can be easily programmable;the application must be functioned over HTTPS to keep the data secure. What’s worth noting is that service worker provides for a programmatic way to cache app resources. The programmatic API endows developers with the ability to decide how to handle caching while offer users with a flexible experience that other options fail to offer.

Final Thoughts:

In a nutshell, we can infer that progressive web apps due to their progressive features will reign the web development industry in the times to come.