What are Progressive web apps?
A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a web application that possesses modern web capabilities and offers an app-like experience to its users. These apps are developed using web technologies like CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Any platform that uses a standards-compliant browser can support PWAs. PWAs offer functions like push notifications, UX similar to native apps, offline functioning, and device hardware access. Such apps don’t require users to install web applications through app marketplaces such as Google Play or Apple App Store.
Best Progressive web app frameworks
With the rise in the demand for Progressive web apps, the number of frameworks has gone through the roof. We have handpicked five best frameworks suitable for building Progressive web apps. Let’s have a look.
VueJS:
Vue is one of the JavaScript frameworks that has a rapidly growing library. Its ability to render at high speed (using Virtual DOM) and offer simple coding makes it a popular Progressive web app framework in the developers’ community. With the incorporation of additional packages, VueJS allows scaling the project.
Laravel and Alibaba, both are known to support VueJS, and hence, Vue has risen to be a highly preferred PWA framework for various big companies. The simplicity of the code shortens the learning curve for developers who are new to it. The structure of this framework is simple as well and inculcates various concepts from the Angular 1 and React frameworks. Moreover, VueJS becomes a lot flexible to set up with the help of TypeScript and JSX.
With such advantages to appreciate, there are a few drawbacks too. VueJS has quite a small support team which proves to be a huge problem for developers. Apart from that, sometimes, extreme flexibility in its structure brings along myriad issues. VueJS cannot function without a good amount of conversion in the legacy code from the current Angular 1.5.
AngularJS:
Angular was launched by Google in 2009. Since then, it has worked up its way to being one of the most popular Progressive web app frameworks. Angular uses the JavaScript ecosystem for creating responsive applications that are reliable and robust.
As maintained by Google, Angular possesses a big community and provides extensive support. It has implementation methodology properly defined and functions on the MVC framework.
AngularJS is quite complex in comparison to other PWA frameworks, though. The learning curve is also steep due to the need for learning Typescript along with it.
Ionic:
Introduced as an open-source SDK back in 2013, Ionic is another popular PWA framework based on Apache Cordova and the Angular framework. Till now, Ionic has been used for creating more than 5 million hybrid applications. It consists of a library of components for Android and iOS, both. Ionic enables web app developers to build web pages that run inside the device’s browser with the use of WebView. It renders web pages in order to make them resemble native applications. Being a free, open-source framework, Ionic helps in reducing the cost of development. It reduces the learning curve as well as it can be used by anyone who is well-versed with Angular and web technologies. Ionic has a large library of plug-ins as well that allows developers to access APIs without any coding.
Just one thing that puts off developers is that Ionic requires frequent updates reworking on the existing apps in order to reflect the latest changes.
React:
React is another well-known PWA framework supported by Facebook. It has an extensive JavaScript library along with a large developer community. To connect to HTML structures, React makes use of JSX for employing render functions. It also makes it easy to scale projects with the addition of packages.
React comes with an extensive ecosystem and offers high flexibility and easy scalability. The same code that is used in React can be used for web apps, as well as, native apps. This framework has a speedy rendering process as it uses Virtual DOM.
React is not very complex, but also not as simple as pure HTML or JavaScript when it comes to writing components. It also requires the knowledge of JSX as this framework is more programmer-oriented. Since it is a relatively new framework and still in its progressive phase, React lacks a clearly defined methodology for implementation.
Polymer:
An open-source PWA framework released by Google, Polymer provides a wide array of tools, web components, and templates that simplify the PWA development process. Pure HTML, JavaScript, and CSS make Polymer an independent PWA framework.
Polymer has a full web app stack support that comprises routing, data tier, and responsive layouts. The framework has amazing documentation that covers each and every phase of the app development. With the development tools embedded in the browser, Polymer rules out the need to use special debugging tools.
The thing about this framework that worries developers is the absence of server-side rendering that leads to high reloading time, multiplied HTTP requests, and less SEO-friendliness.
These were the top five Progressive web application frameworks that web app developers heavily rely on. Let us know in the comments below which PWA framework proved to be the most suitable for you!
Rachit Agarwal
