Service worker resources

At the end of my new book, Going Offline, I have a little collection of resources relating to service workers. Here’s how I introduce them:

If this book were a podcast, then this would be the point at which I would be imploring you to rate me on iTunes (or I’d be telling you about a really good mattress). Instead, I’d like to give you some hyperlinks so that you can explore some of the topics in this brief book in more detail.

It always feels a little strange to publish a list of hyperlinks in a physical book, so I figured I’d republish them here for easy access…

Explanations

• Mariko Kosaka wrote and illustrated an explanation of service workers in a post on her site called “Service Worker, what are you?” (https://kosamari.com/notes/Service-Worker-what-are-you).
• Mariko also wrote and illustrated an explanation of promises called “The Promise of a Burger Party” (https://kosamari.com/notes/the-promise-of-a-burger-party).
• Ire Aderinokun wrote a clear guide to “The Service Worker Lifecycle” (https://bitsofco.de/the-service-worker-lifecycle/).
• Yoav Weiss has an explanation of different kinds of caching in “A Tale of Four Caches” (https://blog.yoav.ws/tale-of-four-caches/).

Guides

• Lyza Gardner wrote a step-by-step guide for Smashing Magazine on “Making A Service Worker: A Case Study” (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/02/making-a-service-worker/).
• Jake Archibald has collected a series of service worker strategies into an “offline cookbook” (https://jakearchibald.com/2014/offline-cookbook/).
• Jake also recorded an excellent online video series that you can enjoy for free (https://www.udacity.com/course/offline-web-applications—ud899).

Examples

• Mike Riethmuller has on offline page on his site that shows articles you’ve previously visited (https://madebymike.com.au/writing/service-workers/).
• Ethan Marcotte has a similar offline page, but he also shows metadata for each article (https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/going-offline/).
• Una Kravets allows you to choose which pages on her site you want to save for reading offline (https://una.im/save-offline/).

Progressive web apps

• Alex Russell answers the question “What, Exactly, Makes Something A Progressive Web App?” (https://infrequently.org/2016/09/what-exactly-makes-something-a-progressive-web-app/).
• Ada Rose Cannon goes into the details of “The Building Blocks Of Progressive Web Apps” (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/09/the-building-blocks-of-progressive-web-apps/).
• Aaron Gustafson quite rightly points out that “Yes, That Web Project Should Be a PWA” (https://alistapart.com/article/yes-that-web-project-should-be-a-pwa).
• Jason Grigsby outlines “The Business Case for Progressive Web Apps” (https://cloudfour.com/thinks/the-business-case-for-progressive-web-apps/).

Tools

• Google released a collection of scripts and tools for going offline called Workbox (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/workbox/).
• To get started with your manifest and service worker, you can paste your website’s URL into PWA Builder (http://preview.pwabuilder.com/).
• Lighthouse is a great testing tool for progressive web apps that’s now bundled into Chrome’s Developer Tools under the Audits panel (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/).

Documentation

• Over at the website of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) you can dig into the details of the Web App Manifest specification (https://www.w3.org/TR/appmanifest/).
• The ever-evolving service worker specification is on the W3C’s Github account (https://w3c.github.io/ServiceWorker/).

This was originally posted on my own site.