Seeing the new age web apps through #weAreDevelopers eyes

Not being very familiar with progressive web apps, service workers and web components, has made this experience more valuable to me, as I had the chance to hear what the NEXT BIG THING is from few of the most experienced people in the web development world.

So, considering four out of five lectures were devoted to progressive web applications, it means they are worth getting familiar with and discovering how are they making the internet a better place. Well I’m gonna share my newly acquired knowledge in a bit.

What are progressive apps? Basically they are regular web apps that provide experience and feeling as if you were using a native mobile app. The biggest advantages are that it eliminates the app installation process by simply existing on the web, and providing an offline support so that when the internet is unavailable, the users will still be able to interact with the app.

Why would you go for it?

It’s pretty clear that it would save you a lot of time and money.

• While with native apps you would develop separate applications for each os and a separate web application, here you have only one app to develop.
• Runs on every OS in every browser.
• Provides offline usage.

How to build the NEXT BIG THING?

Well, since I don’t have quite the experience building these ninja apps, nor this is a step-by-step tutorial, I’ll just share my notes from the conference that endorsed me to dig deeper into the future of web, hoping it will do the same for you.

Bullet points:

• Mobile first approach
• Offline first approach
• Web components
• Service workers

Mobile first approach means designing you app for the smallest screen and working your way up. This approach will make your app responsive on multiple devices and give a smooth experience to the users.

Offline first approach allows your users to interact with the app even though their internet connection is weak or gone. To achieve this in web apps, most recommended tools by the speakers were PouchDB and Apache CouchDB. PouchDB takes care of storing data on the local client so it is always available to the user, while Apache CouchDB syncs data to the cloud storage for sharing, update, and backup purposes when online.

Web components is a suite of different technologies allowing you to create reusable custom elements — with their functionality encapsulated away from the rest of your code — and utilize them in your web apps (by MDN web docs). Frontend developers with experience in component-based frameworks such as Angular 2 and above, React. Vue.js will easily recognize the benefit of this kind of architecture, for what is worth, the Angular team lead announced that they are implementing support for creating web components from the framework itself in version 6. The advantage of web components is that now component-based architecture is available there as part of the html and is framework independent.

Service worker provides rich offline experiences, periodic background syncs, push notifications—functionality that would normally require a native application are now available to the web.

Web components is a suite of different technologies allowing you to create reusable custom elements — with their functionality encapsulated away from the rest of your code — and utilize them in your web apps (by MDN web docs). Frontend developers with experience in component-based frameworks such as Angular 2 and above, React. Vue.js will easily recognize the benefit of this kind of architecture, for what is worth, the Angular team lead announced that they are implementing support for creating web components from the framework itself in version 6. The advantage of web components is that now component-based architecture is available there as part of the html and is framework independent.

All these topics and tools are considered to be the core of the new and powerful web apps that will make the user experience on the web from any device, many times better. In any case, if the community and the big players are endorsing them and are organizing a whole conference just to show you their power and usefulness, it’s definitely worth taking a look 🙂