Chapter 8. Building more resilient applications
As you’ve progressed through this book, you’ve learned how to build Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) that are lightning-fast and offer the user an engaging and interactive experience. In chapter 7, you found out how to build a PWA that caters to situations in which the user may not have a network connection. There may also be situations in which the user has a network connection but it’s really slow or flaky or may drop occasionally. In this chapter, you’ll learn about the best techniques to build resilient web apps that work with poor or unreliable network connections. By the end of this chapter, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to build truly resilient web apps.
Whether the user is in a building in New York with high-speed Wi-Fi or on safari in South Africa with a flaky 2G connection, all modern websites face the same connectivity issues. One of my favorite observations about the challenges of network connections comes from a book by Ilya Grigorik, entitled High Performance Browser Networking (O’Reilly, 2013):
Users dislike slow applications, but broken applications, due to transient network errors, are the worst experience of all. Your mobile application must be robust in the face of common networking failures: unreachable hosts, sudden drops in throughput or increases in latency, or outright loss of connectivity.
He goes on to say the following: