The last Swiss Magento Usergroup Meetup in 2018 took place last Wednesday at the office of eCommerce agency UFirst Group in Zürich. It was dedicated to Progressive Web Applications (PWA). Generally speaking a PWA is a software application, written in the Web platform and running in the browser, that behaves like a cloud-delivered native application. In September 2017 already, Magento frontend architect James Zetlen announced that Magento is going to become a PWA platform.
PWA Browser Support
We already published an article about PWA in German in January which explained, among other things, that Google’s Chrome browser has been supporting PWA since March 2016. By now also Microsoft’s Edge browser has added support, although Internet Explorer 11 and Opera Mini users are still left behind. Opera Mobile 46 for Android offers partial support according to caniuse.com. All the other major browsers out there, provide full support.
PWA Benefits
Progressive Web Apps are user experiences that have the reach of the web, and are:
- Reliable – Load instantly and never show the downasaur, even in uncertain network conditions.
- Fast – Respond quickly to user interactions with silky smooth animations and no janky scrolling.
- Engaging – Feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience.
This new level of quality allows Progressive Web Apps to earn a place on the user’s home screen.
PWA Push Notifications
The first presentation was given by UFirst Group Magento developer Dmitriy Volik about push notifications in PWA. He gave an overview of the push notification frontend API, what is needed to send notifications from Magento, best practices and a small use case. Here’s the audio recording and a link to his slides. The audio quality is not optimal, but it should be good enough.
PWA in Magento 2.3
The second presentation was given by Magento developer, trainer, speaker and consultant Jisse Reitsma from Yireo who joined us remotely. He gave an advanced developer training in Zürich in March 2018 about RequireJS and KnockoutJS, two new technologies in Magento 2 that were not used in Magento 1 and with the replacement of Magento’s frontend with React will loose its importance in due course.
On a sidenote, the next Magento 2.3 developer training with Vinai Kopp will most likely take place in Q1/2019. If you would like to be notified, please subscribe to the Swiss Magento Events newsletter.
The final version of Magento 2.3, which is supposed to be released within the next couple of days, introduces a GraphQL API. Jisse’s talk at the meetup focused on what you can do to already start using it, without going 100% PWA. The presentation if very interactive with questions from the audience in between. The audio quality is very good, so you’re in for a treat. Here’s also the link to his slides.
Jisse is also the organizer of Reacticon, a Magento developer conference on PWA and ReactJS. The last one took place on October 4 and 5, 2018 in Eindhoven/Netherlands, the next one will probably take place after Mage Test Fest, another conference organized by Jisse, which will take place on March 7 and 8, 2019 in Florence/Italy.
The learning curve for React is a lot smaller than for the current #Magento 2 frontend
We just reached 100 members in the Swiss Magento Usergroup. The meetup takes place every couple of months in Zürich, Bern and other Swiss cities. The presentations are usually directed to both developers, users and store owners. It’s a free community event organized by the community for the community. Feel free to join us on meetup.com/magento-switzerland.
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