Progressive Web Apps

SD Times / Thursday, August 9, 2018

As users seek the same kind of experience from a mobile app or web app on their devices, progressive web apps have become a way for developer teams to give the best of both worlds.

In a special feature published in SD Times last year that still holds up today, we examine the benefits and drawbacks of developing and deploying these PWAs, and a blog post from January dives more deeply into what is required to build an effective PWA.

We’ve seen a great deal of uptake in PWAs since Google created the model in 2015. Testing provider, Perfecto, recently announced support for PWAs, and Microsoft earlier this month gave detailed instructions for creating PWAs on its platform.

A critical element of a PWA is the service worker. This acts as kind of a request fulfillment service and is critical for reducing latency and delivering content at the speed of a native application. Google has written an in-depth introduction to service workers to help developers get up to speed with PWAs more quickly.

Angular 6.1

The last minor 6.x release of Angular dropped about a week and a half ago, with features including router scroll position restoration, ShadowDOM v1 view encapsulation and schematics chaining, among other improvements. Stephen Fluin, Angular developer advocate at Google, details the new functionality  in a blog post.

He did say Angular developers can expect to see 7.0 betas coming soon as the team works toward the next major release.