In a series of articles we explore all you need to know about how to design and build a Progressive Web App from scratch. What is it? How to build it? What components are needed? What are the back-end needs? What are the front-end needs?
Building a Progressive Web App (PWA) - blog series
We've started a cool blog series here. The three words on everyone's mouths these days are Progressive Web Apps - or PWA for short. It is predicted by Google to revolutionise the way we build and consume mobile apps. A true challenger to native apps. Just build your app the way you normally do, implement a set list of features and support (for offline, etc) and your webapp will work just as an native app on mobile! Access to bluetooth? No problem. Install on homescreen? No problem.
If you want to know more about PWA, Alan explains that brilliantly in another blog post.
Follow us on our journey to learn all about PWA, and follow us when we build our first PWA! We start out from the very beginning by exploring all the different alternatives we have for front-end frameworks and back-end frameworks. Follow our reasoning, learn from our research, and keep the comments coming!
We now have four posts published (and the entire PWA itself is downloadable as open source software). Lets get started reading:
Part 1: Background and Back-end
Have you been forced to build apps for iOS and Android to stay relevant? Are you annoyed by websites pushing it's native app every time you visit? Did you ever wish you could use web-technology instead? The solution is finally here - it's called Progressive Web Apps (PWA).
Part 2: RESTless search for a front-end framework
What happens when our developers are challenged to choose a front-end framework suitable for our Progressive Web App, and at the same time to drop the RESTful approach for the new-kid-on-the-block: GraphQL? This is the second post where we share insight from our development team when building a PWA from scratch.
Part 3: Using GraphQL for querying data
The most common approach for our PWA task is probably to just use any database out there. But we won't settle for the norm. Instead we'll push the boundaries by fully relying on GraphQL as our query language of choice in the app. Let us explain more.
Part 4: What we learned, and the future of PWA
Looking back, what did we learn when building a complete PWA app from absolutely nothing? We share pitfalls and some tips for you as we conclude our PWA series. We'll also look into the future of PWA.
