Now, Now-Now, or Just-Now: Building network-tolerant PWAs

Web experiences are brittle. The widespread availability of service worker, complemented with good tooling such as workbox, allow us to effectively address intermittent connectivity. This code-oriented talk will show how to practically use workbox to create robust, network tolerant web experiences.

Web experiences are brittle. There are lots of things that break them: poor network coverage, over-subscribed access points, power interruptions and even cable theft. Historically, we have simply shrugged and given up, but now we can do better. The widespread availability of service worker, complemented with good tooling such as workbox, allow us to effectively address intermittent connectivity.

This code-oriented talk will show how to practically use workbox to create robust, network tolerant web experiences. It will cover the creation of service workers for preloading, caching, and even full offline support using the background sync API.

Progressive Web Apps have a lot of focus at the moment as a view of the ‘next generation’ or web sites. The big international companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc) have identified that the affordances and assumptions of the American and European markets (reliable connectivity, speed and availability) do not work in a developing world context. As a part of targeting the ‘next billion users’, the way we build and design for the web has to change.

The title of the talk relates to idiosyncratic South African slang. Now-now and just-now are ways of inconsistently referring to some time in the future - it might be seconds, minutes or hours. Now implies immediately (as per normal), Now-Now means it will happen with a time delay (minutes to hours), and Just-Now means “I’ll get to it eventually” (or not at all :P). It lets me introduce the concepts of eventual consistency in the context of web development, as well as poke some fun at my home country.

I am a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, and Progressive Web Apps are my area of research - particularly the offline or network resilient web applications.

Here are some links to talks I’ve given recently: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLogKLN8lVLN0H8veB57MIKrLGB_MJJLDh