Guidance For Building Mobile First App That Is Browser Friendly

Wappler General
#1

I’m moving off of jquery mobile due to being deprecated. I am really searching for a simple, flexible alternative for building a rich feature-set WebApp that is Mobile centric, but that can be accessed on the web.

The web component is important since it will contain a growing archive of searchable user-created content. The tablet/phone experience is also increasingly important for obvious reasons. My preferred approach would be to develop a PWA (progressive web app) via a UI framework like framework7, or even Bootstrap, then use capacitorjs for publishing to Android & iOS. So here are my 3 questions:

  1. I love the robust UI, database, and codebase options in Wappler and wondered what workflow you would recommend for approximating this experience. I would like to use a single codebase, limiting the number of hoops I have to jump through to ensure that my mobile user’s experience is consistent and that the backed does not have to be refactored for each environment.

  2. Does Wappler have concrete plans to ‘wrap’ in capacitorjs to allow for true PWA functionality?

  3. Has anyone experimented with developing on Wappler and processing the codebase through capacitorjs for producing PWAs?

I have also been looking at Thorium. It’s not nearly as flexible, built out, or supported as Wappler, but the PWA option is attractive as a starting point.

In any case, great work on Wappler, and any guidance on this question would be greatly appreciated.

RP

#2

Hi.
I don’t have any opinions around capacitorjs, as I have never used it. I have seen it before, and it looks great but I don’t understand it enough to know if Wappler will integrate it.

We have created many regular responsive web apps with Wappler, and have wrapped a few into PWA using PWABuilder.com. We’ve used caching and offline capabilities of PWA in them.

We haven’t had the need for things like notifications etc, so haven’t made use of such advanced PWA functionalities.

#3

Sid, thanks for taking the time to comment. I really appreciate your perspective and practical experience. My strength is not app development, but optimizing various systems and technologies around a common objective.

For what it’s worth, my hunch is that PWAs are going to gain more and more acceptance, even by iOS - like the USB-C standard that eventually had to be integrated by Apple. It just makes too much sense. And for those of us who are transitioning off of older tech, we would rather invest our time in simpler solutions that are better integrated into existing and future platforms.

That being said, I really applaud the Wappler principle of visualization with the ability to manipulate the core code.

So, if I wanted to experiment with Wappler in building a responsive web app that I could run in the browser, and then package into a PWA using PWA Builder (and thanks for that reference!), do you have any Wappler workflow recommendations or big caveats I should be aware of?

(Oh, and any comments from the Wappler dev team about potential support for PWAs would also be welcome!]

1 Like
#4

Not really to be honest. PWA end of things need to be set as per the specs. Two things I remember from my experience:
In nodejs, you will have to put service worker in public folder.
And,
If you have a SPA, make sure to correctly identify route URLs when caching them for offline use.

Like I said, I haven’t used the full suit of features available in PWA, so there might be some caveats with Wappler for other implementations.

If you do try out some advanced stuff, do share here in community. :slightly_smiling_face: