CODEWITHSUNDEEP
reactjsexpresssocket.ioservice-worker
user6046794
user6046794

Reputation:

Do I need a service worker when my application often communicates with the server?

I'm working on a simple chat application that uses this frameworks, libraries: react, socket.io, express.

When a user opens the web app for the first time, he sees a login form, and after login, the server retrieves the list of all users and sends it to the client. When someone writes a new message, the server sends the message to all the clients.

As you can see, every part of the app depends on the server.

Does it make sense to use a service worker? Can it be at all?

As far as I know, a service worker is good at storing images, css, js files, and it help the users to use the app while they don't have internet connection.

But I do not know when everything depends on the server what can be done.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 696

Answers (2)

NOtherDev
NOtherDev

Reputation: 9672

Sure you can benefit from having a Service Worker, it is universal enough to have an application for all kinds of applications and I don't agree it is only good for static assets.

It all depends on the actual requirements for you application, obviously. But technically there is no limitation that would prevent you from caching your users response in the Service Worker.

Remember that "offline" is a condition that happens in multiple circumstances - not only being far from the network coverage, but also outages, interferences, lie-fi or going through a tunnel. So it can as well happen intermittently during your app operation and it might make sense to prepare for it.

You can for example store your messages for offline in IndexedDB and for messages sent during that time, register a Background Sync event to send it to the server when the connectivity is back. This way users might still be able to use the app in the limited fashion (read the previously exchanged messages and post their own messages to be sent out later).

Upvotes: 1

pate
pate

Reputation: 5253

You have a great question.

You can most certainly use a Service Worker but most likely not to the extent some other apps could use it. You have outlined the problem yourself: your website depends on the server so it's not possible to make it offline or so. Some other websites could be made offline or could be made mostly offline showing some content without network connection and giving the full experience when connectivity comes back, but that doesn't sound like to be the case for your website.

Based on the description you've given, there's still something you could easily use Service Worker for, however. You've understand correctly that SW is very good at storing (caching) static assets and serving them from the device's cache without any network connectivity. You could use this feature and make your site faster. You could use a SW to proactively cache all the static assets of your site and have the SW return them from the local cache without requesting anything from the network. This would make your site a bit or much faster, depending on the user's connectivity (if the user has a slow 3G connection, then the SW would make the site super fast; if the user has a steady fiber or whatnot, then the difference wouldn't be that huge).

You could also make your site available offline without any internet connectivity. In that situation you would of course show the user a message saying "Hey, it seems like you're offline! Shoot! You need connectivity to use the app. We'll continue as soon as we get the bits flowing!" since this would probably make the user experience nicer.

So, in conclusion: you can leverage SW to make the initial loading of the site faster but you most likely won't get as much out of a SW configuration as some other site would get.

If you have any other questions or would like to have some clarifications, just comment :)

Upvotes: 1

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