tarwin
commented
5 years ago Hi all. Has you been able to add service workers in the root as yet? We are looking forward to this as we need it for web push, which we offer as part of our platform which is integrated in to VTEX (Fanplayr).
Native support for PWAs
Bringing the power of Progressive Web Apps to the VTEX ecosystem
Motivation
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are a new standard of good practices and new technologies that bring the power of Native Apps experience to the Web.
Big players like Flipkart, Trivago, Twitter, Uber and Aliexpress already offer PWA solutions in production, and they have been sharing some incredible numbers. Most notably it's said to increase conversion rates, improve user engagement and optimize User-centric Performance Metrics.
Among many improvements PWAs bring to any web experience, I think these are the most interesting ones for Ecommerce:
...and all of that with the same good old Web technologies we at VTEX are experts in.
Implementation
MVP
Technically all it takes to be a PWA is:
These 3 steps could be considered a MVP for this project. They are probably very easy to achieve in an automatic manner for VTEX stores, and can be considered juicy low-hanging fruits for the platform.
Not-so-minimum, Viable Product
To take this effort to a new level we'd need some technical digging on which PWA APIs we could leverage the support and configuration of:
Iteration zero
Breninho told me there's a small initiative by Bruno Abreu and Anderson Moreira currently working on VTEX Beta that enables Service Workers to be hosted in the website's root directory.
I think we can do better than this to reach a level where we can say VTEX natively supports PWAs. This would really put us on the main stage as a powerful ecommerce platform that is up to date with the latest technologies - especially when it involves improvements on conversion rates for our clients.
By the way, Andres Pradilla and Julian Cecchi said there are already some of our clients interested on this support and willing to help us.
Read more
Google's homepage for PWA https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/
Case Studies (impressive results!) OLX: https://developers.google.com/web/showcase/2017/olx AliExpress: https://developers.google.com/web/showcase/2016/aliexpress Flipkart's (India’s largest e-commerce site): https://developers.google.com/web/showcase/2016/flipkart Twitter: https://developers.google.com/web/showcase/2017/twitter
Article: Native apps are doomed (pt.1 and pt.2, by Eric Elliott) https://medium.com/javascript-scene/native-apps-are-doomed-ac397148a2c0 https://medium.com/javascript-scene/why-native-apps-really-are-doomed-native-apps-are-doomed-pt-2-e035b43170e9
Article: Progressive Web App Libraries in Production (by Addy Osmani) https://medium.com/dev-channel/progressive-web-app-libraries-in-production-b52cad37d34
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