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Ask HN: PWAs have failed to establish themselves, now what?
- pestatije 6y agoPWAs?
- PaulHoule 6y agoProgressive Web Apps. It is something like this. You could build a web site (say a store directory or a blog) that is a Javascript program that downloads content as JSON and formats it. If you are careful about 50 kinds of bloat that can be very efficient, but it is still dependent on the internet connection, or rather the connection will hang a long time or fail and the application could deal more or less gracefully with that. In "mobile" applications interruptions are a fact of life, and you'd like to have an answer. PWA looks like a Rube Goldberg machine but it fits well into the weird and wacky asynchronous world of the web browser. It replaces http calls with calls to a "Web Worker" which as an independent Javascript runtime which could be cacheing or preloading, computing. It's like a little server that runs on the client. It has problems in the "does it really improve performance?" problems. Personally I'd be glad if the Best Buy app preloaded data about my neighborhood store but don't want to wait 1s when I am doing something unrelated later because it is downloading data from Huntington Beach, CA. If there were some kind of framework for a WebWorker that was easily configurable, independent on most details of the application, tested on all platforms, etc. it might be more widespread. None really caught on so the developer who needs to make one is going to get into a tricky corner of Javascript.