11. PWAs From the Start

To this point, you’ve cobbled together a Pirate PWA piece by piece and you took a movie app and totally transformed it (at least in the eyes of Lighthouse and the PWA world). There’s nothing devs love more, though, than starting a new project from scratch. Just mention the words “greenfield” or “starter kit” to a software developer and watch their eyes light up. So in this chapter I’ll talk about creating a progressive web app even before you add in any application logic. To do that, I need to talk about the most popular frameworks and libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem today. While it is a completely valid option to stick with VanillaJS to write your JavaScript apps (just look at that beautiful pirate app, after all), nowadays it’s probably most common to use some kind of library or framework. There are just too many advantages to using React or Angular or lots of others to completely and purposely avoid them. And now that PWAs are taking the world by storm, those frameworks and libraries are following suit by giving you a PWA with just a few keystrokes. In this chapter, I’ll talk about those keystrokes by covering a handful of the PWA-friendly frameworks and libraries available today: React, the ultra popular library originating from Facebook; Preact, a smaller and faster React alternative; Vue.js, the tiny view-focused library that has really blown up in the past year; Angular, the revamped component-based solution from Google; and Ionic, the mobile-centric framework built on top of Angular.