Preface
PWA issue is new and as of April 2018, the features and it’s very important to know what are PWA frameworks? PWA frameworks are supported by Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari browsers, but more browsers may support the features needed in the future. So we need to know what are PWA frameworks? what is Progressive Web App (PWA) is a new class of Web Applications that provide native app experiences using a browser.
if you know what are PWA frameworks; all PWA’s functions are enabled even when the device is offline.PWAs are just web apps that have the look and feel of native apps they are responsive.why use The PWA? They don’t need to be downloaded from an app store. why the PWA? PWAs are safe. They don’t take up much space (unlike many native apps). why use The PWA? they’re free to install on your phone, tablet or desktop.
in this article, we want to describe the definition and characteristics and what are PWA frameworks?. Then in part2 of this article, we develop this argument on famous WPA examples and advantages and disadvantages of PWA.
What is PWA? (Progressive Web Application)
A Progressive Web App is known as an abbreviation PWA is a web application that uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like experience to users. These apps meet certain requirements, which are deployed to servers, accessible through URLs, and indexed by search engines.
You can deploy your app as a PWA as well as a Native app. They are intended to work on any platform that uses a standards-compliant browser. PWA’s functionality includes working offline, push notifications, and device hardware access, enabling creating user experiences similar to native applications on mobile devices. There is no requirement for developers or users to install web apps via digital distribution systems like Apple App Store or Google Play.
The PWA characteristics
According to Google Developers, the PWA should have the following characteristics:
1-Progressive:
Works for every user, regardless of browser choice.
2-Responsive:
Fits any form factors like desktop, mobile, tablet, or forms yet to emerge.
3-Faster after initial loading:
After the initial loading has finished, the same content and page elements do not have to be re-downloaded each time, on progressive web applications, the elements do not need to be re-rendered again.
4-Connectivity independent:
Service workers allow offline uses, or on low-quality networks.
5-App-like:
Feels like an app to the user with app-style interactions and navigation.
6-Fresh:
Always up-to-date due to the service worker update process.
7-Safe:
Served via HTTPS to prevent snooping and ensure content hasn’t been tampered with.
8-Discoverable:
Identifiable as an “application” by manifest.json and service worker registration, and discoverable by search engines.
9-Re-engageable:
Ability to use push notifications to maintain engagement with the user.
10-Installable:
It provides home screen icons without the use of an App Store.
11-Linkable:
It can easily be shared via a URL and does not require complex installation.
PWA framework: what are PWA frameworks?
The rise of progressive web apps is tremendous. A PWA is a web application that feels like a native application to the user. By making your app a PWA, not only do you acquire new users, but you can also retain them for longer.
The first step in building a progressive web app is to choose a core framework. There are many frameworks, and I encourage you to look at the choices, but we use React, for two reasons:
- It’s managed and supported by Facebook, which uses the framework on its sites and thereby demonstrates that the framework is rigorously tested with 1.18 billion users daily.
- React is the foundation for React Native, which lets you easily port apps built with React to native apps.
Ionic
Ionic is one of the most popular frameworks for building a progressive web app. Let’s look at a few reasons why you should choose Ionic as your PWA framework
- Free and open-source: Ionic is open source, and licensed under MIT. Open-source means developers can manage the code structure easily, saving time, money and efforts. They also have a worldwide community forum to connect with other Ionic developers, ask questions, and help out others.
- Cross-platform and one-codebase: Ionic allows the seamless building of apps across popular operating systems, such as Android, iOS and Windows. It has a one codebase feature. This means apps are deployed through Apache Cordova with a single code base, and the application adapts automatically to the device it is functioning in.
- Rich UI: Ionic is equipped with pre-built components that are used to customize design themes and elements. It is based on SASS UI, with rich features to create fast, robust, interactive, native-like applications.
- Powerful functionality: Ionic is supported by Angular. The component API of Angularhelps developers create interactive hybrid and web apps. Ionic is equipped with Cordova Plugins for accessing various native features, like Camera, GPS, and so on. It also features a powerful CLI for building, testing and deploying apps across multiple platforms.
Polymer
Google’s Polymer App Toolbox is another contender for the development of PWAs. It is a collection of web components, tools, and templates for building Progressive Web Apps.
Blends PWAs with Web components
Polymer allows developers to architect a component-based web app using Polymer and Web Components.
Web components can form encapsulated and reusable custom HTML elements. They are independent of the frameworks because they are made of pure HTML/CSS/JS, unlike framework-dependent UI components in React/ Angular. The web components are provided through a light-weight Polymer Library for creating framework-independent, custom components.
More features include:
- Responsive design using the app layout components.
- Modular routing using the elements.
- Localization.
- Turnkey support for local storage with app storage elements.
- Offline caching as a progressive enhancement, using service workers.
- Build tooling to support serving the app multiple ways: unbundled for delivery over HTTP/2 with server push, and bundled for delivery over HTTP/1.
Each component whether used separately or together can be used to build a full-featured Progressive web app. Most importantly, each component is additive. For a simple app one only needs the app-layout. As it gets more complicated, developers can add routing, offline caching, and a high-performance server as required.
Angular
Angular, probably the most popular front-end web application platform, can also be used to make robust, reliable, and responsive PWAs. Before the release of version 5, supporting progressive web apps in Angular required a lot of expertise on the developers’ part. Version 5 comes equipped with a new version of the Angular Service Worker for built-in PWA support. Angular 6 (released a few times back) has two new CLI commands. Both these versions make it very simple to make web applications downloadable and installable, just like a native mobile application.
With Angular 5 the development of Service Workers is becoming significantly easier. By using Angular CLI developers can choose to add Service Worker functionality by default.
- The Angular Service Worker functionality is provided by the module @angular/service-worker.
- A service worker can power up an application by only providing some JSON configuration instead of writing the code manually.
- The key difference with other service worker generators (like Workbox, SW-precache) is the fact, that you do not re-generate the service worker file itself, you only update its control file.
The bottom line is that the frameworks for building progressive web apps are growing and expanding at a rapid rate with regular updates every couple of months. Choosing a particular framework thus doesn’t make much difference to the app behavior. It only depends on the developer’s area of interest and expertise.
React
Supported by Facebook, React is often one of the top choices of Progressive Web App builders because of its wide JavaScript library and a large community.
Although Pure JavaScript lies in the base of React, it makes use of JSX to employ render functions for connecting HTML structures. This gives developers ease which in return makes React one of the top PWA frameworks and tools.
The pros list of React looks something like this –
- Large community support
- An extensive ecosystem
- A greater degree of scalability and flexibility
- Speedy rendering with Virtual-DOM.
Lighthouse
Developed by Google to improve the quality of web apps, the tool measures your website in multiple criteria and enlists the factors that you have to keep into consideration to ensure your site is ready to become a PWA.
It analyzes your digital offerings and gives you the areas to implement in your PWA development process.
So here were the six frameworks and Progressive Web App tools that have been relied upon by the industry and by our team of in-house PWA builders for converting your idea into an app that merges the best of mobile and web.
Vue.js
Vue is presently one of the fastest evolving libraries because of the ease in coding and high-speed rendering. It allows for scaling of the project with an added advantage of extra packages.
The pros of Vue.js which makes it one of the most reliable frameworks to build PWA includes –
- Supported by Laravel and Alibaba
- The simplicity of code lowers the learnability curve
- Simple structures and features inspired by Angular1 and React
- Fast rendering with Virtual DOM
- Flexible to set up with the help of TypeScript and JSX
So here were the 6 frameworks and Progressive Web App tools that have been relied upon by the industry and by our team of in-house PWA builders for converting your idea into an app that merges the best of mobile and web.
Conclusion
Progressive web apps are the best in class web experiences. Not only are the best web sites they offer user experiences in parity with native app counterparts. They offer many advantages to businesses to engage with customers with native apps that cannot touch.
The popularity graph that the mobile app type is on has given birth to several PWA frameworks and tools that are being prepared to strengthen the debate of Native vs PWA in favor of the latter.
There are several PWA frameworks and tools presently operating in the market. But the ones that we rely on most are:
- Ionic
- Polymer
- AngularJS
- React
- Lighthouse
- Vue.js
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