Establishing a connection between the mobile and the powerful web was challenging, until Frances Berriman, a designer, and Alex Russell, a Google Chrome Engineer coined the concept of Progressive Web Apps in 2015.
No sooner did the PWA concept arouse, than Google started advertising the benefits of PWA which attracted the big players of the industry towards adopting PWA.
Progressive Web Apps are continuously gaining popularity due to their high compatibility on almost all web browsers and all devices like phones, desktops, laptops, or any other screen.
Providing the users with an ‘app like’ experience, the progressive web apps have features and navigations similar to that of apps.
With the rising of Progressive Web Apps and also, keeping in mind its remarkable features, it’s advantageous to know about the top frameworks that help in building quality PWAs.
The top 6 frameworks to build Progressive Web Apps are:
React
Facebook supported React, is a popular choice for developing Progressive Web Apps. It has a huge community and is based on JavaScript. But, for linking with the HTML structures, the framework makes use of JSX. There are various packages available in React, that can be used in PWA projects to expand it further.
Advantages:
- React is accompanied by community support from Facebook.
- Rendering is fast using Virtual-DOM.
- App development is highly flexible with React.
- The ecosystem is very extensive.
Drawbacks:
- The community is relatively a newbie, hence the supports provided by it is relatively poor.
- The use of JSX requires good programming knowledge, and the language is different from JavaScript and HTML.
Angular
Angular was introduced by Google in 2009.
Since then, the framework has been the top choice for developing impressive and powerful PWAs. JavaScript is at the base of the Angular framework.
Advantages:
- Supported by a large community maintained by Google.
- An extensive ecosystem
- It comes in combination with Typescript and IntelliSense.
- The framework is MVC type.
- Learning is easier due to the presence of CLI.
Drawbacks:
- Typescript makes learning Angular a bit difficult.
Ionic
Based on Apache Cordova and Angular, Ionic came up in 2013 as an open-source SDK.
Ionic gained huge popularity as it is equipped with a large library of Android and iOS components. The web pages created in Ionic can be viewed inside the devices’ web browsers using WebView.
Advantages:
- Code-free access to APIs using a vast number of available plugins.
- Easy debugging
- Being free and open-source, Ionic is cost-effective.
Drawbacks:
- The web app requires the latest updates and the version updates are very frequent.
Lighthouse
Created by Google, the Lighthouse lights up the areas of your web app that needs to be improved or modified to further enhances the complete web app.
Advantages:
- 5 different scores including SEO and PWAs, can be chosen to be received in Lighthouse.
- Competitor web pages can be tracked easily as there is no need for any addition of codes.
Vue.js
Similar to React, Vue comes with additional packages that can be used in producing improved PWAs. Vue is simple to use, and rendering is speedy. The framework has Angular1 and React-inspired features and the simplicity in coding makes it easier to learn Vue.
Advantages:
- Typescript and JSX to help set up flexibly.
- Virtual-DOM offering speedy rendering.
Polymer
Polymer is an open-source framework that is equipped with a variety of templates, a vast number of PWA tools, and other web components, all headed to massively improvise the web apps. The framework is based on JS/HTML/CSS.
Advantages:
- Impressive documentation
- The APIs are easily understandable.
- No extra debugging tools are required, as the development tools are already embedded in the browser.
Drawbacks:
- The reloading time is high.
- The framework is not much friendly with SEO.
- The polymer has no IDE of its own.