Modern Mobile Web Development II: The Role of Workers and Offline Cache

This is the second post of a series of articles about how the several technologies conforming the New Gaia Architecture (NGA) fit together to speed the Web.

In the first chapter, we focused on performance and resource efficiency and we realised the potential conflict between the multi-page approach to web applications where each view is isolated in its own (no iframe) document and the need for keeping in memory all the essential logic & data to avoid unnecessary delays and meet the time constrains for an optimal user experience.

In this chapter I will explore web workers in its several flavours: dedicated workers, shared workers and service workers and how they can be combined to beat some of these delays. As a reminder, here is the breakdown from the previous episode:

1. Navigate to a new document.
2. Download resources (which includes the template).
3. Set your environment up (include loading shared libraries).
4. Query your API for the model.
5. Combine the template with your model.
6. Render the content.

Offliner: switch the Web offline

Offliner is a proof of concept about bringing offline web applications through service workers.

Service workers allows the developer to intercept resource requests to the network and take control of the fetching process. In addition with caches, service workers enable the Web to success where AppCache failed.

Offliner is a project aimed to provide a service worker intended to be as transparent and automatic as possible while keeping a lot of customization power. It tries to always fetch from network and fallbacks to cache when remote resources are unreachable for any reason. You can follow Offiliner on GitHub.