Updated 20-Sep-2023
Apparently Progressive Web Apps are a thing. (Thanks Leon!)
Anyone know of any agencies who've developed #ProgressiveWebApps esp. with service workers? We have a work project for you...
— Leon Paternoster (@leonpaternoster) September 12, 2016
While the technology was announced (apparently) in 2015, in the March 2016 Google I/O there were many training and presentation events, such as the below.
What are Progressive Web Apps
From what I can tell, basically it allows web apps to act more like native apps. Basically there is an intermediary process called service worker which allows for responsiveness when offline or on spotty networks. Also, multiple service workers can be spun up so that there can be a nice migration from one version to another (e.g., when offline becomes online again). This is done in javascript, and not really a lot of it. The basic concept is offline first and something called stale while revalidate, a cache control option. Note that browsers will likely have this in a year or two, but can do now in service worker. The basic underlying model is network resilience including the ability to send information during network down, which then will send on network up. Another term is progressive web enhancement which is the experience delivered by these progressive web apps. Note that speed goals are 1 second on cable and 3 seconds on 3G.
More about Progressive Web Apps
- A Beginner's Guide to Progressive Web Apps - Smashing Magazine
- The Building Blocks Of Progressive Web Apps - Smashing Magazine
- Things I learned making a Progressive Web App - Medium
- Talking Progressive Web Apps with Ionic’s Justin Willis
- Offline Storage for Progressive Web Apps
- IndexdDB but with promises, use this for the data storage
- Intro to Progressive Web Apps - Free Udacity course