This is such a lovely, lovely review from Marc!
Jeremy’s way of writing certainly helps, as a specialised or technical book on a topic like Service Workers, could certainly be one, that bores you to death with dry written explanations. But Jeremy has a friendly, fresh and entertaining way of writing books. Sometimes I caught myself with a grin on my face…
I strongly recommend that you read Going Offline by Jeremy Keith. Before his book, I found the concept of service workers quite daunting and convinced myself that it’s one of those things that I’ll have to set aside a big chunk of time to learn. I got through Jeremy’s book in a few hours and felt confident and inspired. This is because he’s very good at explaining concepts in a friendly, concise manner.
Very valuable observations from Paul on his travels, talking to developers and business people about progressive web apps—there’s some confusion out there.
My personal feeling is that everyone is really hung up on the A in PWA: ‘App’. It’s the success and failure of the branding of the concept; ‘App’ is in the name, ‘App’ is in the conscious of many users and businesses and so the associations are quite clear.
This is a heartbreaking observation by Eric. He’s not anti-HTTPS by any stretch, but he is pointing out that caching servers become a thing of the past on a more secure web.
Can we do anything? For users of up-to-date browsers, yes: service workers create a “good” man in the middle that sidesteps the HTTPS problem, so far as I understand. So if you’re serving content over HTTPS, creating a service worker should be one of your top priorities right now, even if it’s just to do straightforward local caching and nothing fancier.
What an excellent question! And what an excellent bit of sleuthing to get to the bottom of it. This is like linguistic spelunking on the World Wide Web.
Oh, and of course I love the little sidenote at the end.
Smart thinking—similar to this post from last year—about using the navigator.connection API from a service worker to serve up bandwidth-appropriate images.
This is giving me some ideas for my own site.
Here’s the first part of a chat I had on Friends Talk Frontend about Resilient Web Design and Going Offline.
I remember Jason telling me about this weird service worker caching behaviour a little while back. This piece is a great bit of sleuthing in tracking down the root causes of this strange issue, followed up with a sensible solution.
I talked for an hour about service workers ‘n’ stuff
(Also available on Huffduffer.)
This is a lovely review of Going Offline from Garrett:
With his typical self-effacing humour (chapter titles include Making Fetch Happen and Cache Me If You Can), and easy manner, Jeremy explains how Service Workers, uh, work, the clever things you can do with them, and most importantly, how to build your own.
Best of all, he’s put it into action!
To that end, this site now has its own home-grown, organic, corn fed, Service Worker.
Adriana Blum lists progressive web apps that are doing very, very well from Twitter, Trivago, Starbucks, Forbes, Debebhams, West Elm, Washington Post, Pinterest, AliExpress, and Lancôme.
Instead of choosing between the immediacy of a mobile website and the rich experience offered by native apps, you can now offer your target audiences the best of both and improve the commercial performance of your business to boot.
Jake’s blow-by-blow account of uncovering a serious browser vulnerability is fascinating. But if you don’t care for the technical details, skip ahead to to how different browser makers handled the issue—it’s very enlightening. (And if you do care for the technical details, make sure you click on the link to the PDF version of this post.)
Here’s a really quick (ten minute) talk about the offline user experience that I gave at the Delta V conference recently. I’m quite happy with how it turned out—there’s something to be said for having a short and snappy time slot.
There’s a common misconception that making a Progressive Web App means creating a Single Page App with an app-shell architecture. But the truth is that literally any website can benefit from the performance boost that results from the combination of HTTPS + Service Worker + Web App Manifest.
“Ah, this is good news!”, I thought, reading this update about how service worker scripts won’t be cached.
And that was the moment when I realised what an utter nerd I had become.
I was just talking about how browser-based games are the perfect use-case for service workers. Andrzej Mazur breaks down how that would work:
This is a good walkthrough of the flow you’d need to implement if you want to notify users of an updated service worker.
Here are the slides and links from the talk I just gave at the Delta V conference. I had ten minutes, but to be honest, just saying the name of the talk tells you everything.
This is such a nice review of Going Offline from Eric!
As anyone who has received unsolicited (or solicited) feedback from me about their book knows, I’m an extremely picky reader, and I have no significant complaints on this one. Highly recommended.
It is very disheartening to read misinformation like this:
A progressive web app is an enhanced version of a Single Page App (SPA) with a native app feel.
To quote from The Last Jedi, “Impressive. Everything you just said in that sentence is wrong.”
But once you get over that bit of misinformation at the start, the rest of this article is a good run-down of planning and building a progressive web app using one possible architectural choice—the app shell model. Other choices are available.
I really enjoyed chatting with Mark and Ben on the Relative Paths podcast. We talked about service workers and Going Offline, but we also had a good musical discussion.