Progressive Web Apps for Drupal - Reliable, Fast, Engaging

Introduction

In this 25 minute session you will learn more about push notifications and how we use this new progressive web app feature in our Drupal 8 distribution Open Social, to improve user engagement with our product.

In an ever evolving techscape it’s important to keep up to date with innovations. Progressive Web Apps are a new way to deliver amazing user experiences on the web. We argue that PWA are:

1. Reliable - Load instantly even in uncertain network conditions.

2. Fast - Respond quickly to user interactions.

3. Engaging - Feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience.

This new level of quality earns Progressive Web Apps a place on the user's home screen just like a native app would.

But how do we integrate this awesomeness in Open Social, our Drupal 8 distribution, and even more importantly; how can you do it too? You will hear our experiences developing it, our enthusiasm getting it to work and why we would love it to be available in Drupal 8.

Intended audience & takeaways

This talk is interesting for developers with a beginner to intermediate experience level. 

In this session we include instructions and demonstrations of topics including:

- Introduction to progressive web apps and the web app manifest
- Web push and the W3C Push API
- How Service workers work and an introduction to their basic architecture
- Insights on push events
- How we used the popular Drupal message module as a base for our architecture
- The future and contributing back to Drupal so everybody can get a taste of this

After this session the audience should leave the room with an insight in Progressive Web Apps. We will focus especially on how push notifications work and how people can leverage its power in their own projects. 

You can find the slides over here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yw-ePLpa5tum-ItReFIoP-cbwsnn-YOkKxBpy-k8P9s/edit
and the code
https://drupal.org/project/social_pwa