being introduced to Progressive Web Apps

Its been a while. In the quiet I have been trying to get back to my Build roots. One of my recent outings was to the Microsoft Build Tour in Sydney

So, you have a  web app but you would like to enhance it and make it more friendly for your users without rewriting it to suit each platform. The hackathon day enabled me to work though this scenario, enabling a simple web app fro the cloud and making it cloud and  multi device ready.

Progressive web apps allows existing web applications to be faster, deal with offline scenarios and to be delivered on different OS’s and application stores. You can take a web app and auto generate a platform native application. You can extend it and deal with offline scenarios.

The magic – An underlying service called a service worker - https://preview.pwabuilder.com.

All you need to update your web app to be PWA aware, then add in platform specific features.

Installation of new clients are generated from the web app by using a script: preview.pwabuilder.com/generator

If you would like to DIY you can start here: https://bthack.azurewebsites.net/

Be sure you follow Andrew Coates instructions to prep yourself beforehand : https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/acoat/2017/06/25/build-tour-sydney-hack-are-you-ready/

What you'll be able to do within an hour or two:

1. 1. Deploy a web app to an Azure App Service
   2. Use the web application offline. Offline copy of pages
   3. Creating a Windows 10 native app and debugging the application in the same fashion as a web app
   4. Add to the local app Windows 10 features to extend the application. Through feature detection
   5. App linking – Demonstrating redirecting from a web site URL to your Windows 10 application
   6. In memory caching

References:

/en-us/windows/uwp/launch-resume/web-to-app-linking