This week's Wednesday Evening Training: Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and an intermezzo on cryptography

In this week's Wednesday Evening Training we had a great intro on Progressive Web Apps (PWA) by one of our front end engineers Olaf van Venetie and I. As an intermezzo, Bart van Beek gave an excellent intro and Q&A on cryptography.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA's): what's the buzz?

Progressive Web Apps is a hot topic in the world of web development and its only growing further in popularity. It is a relatively new way to develop applications for the mobile phone, combining the best of the web and apps. 
This Wednesday Evening Training we covered the benefits using a PWA instead of traditional hybrid/native solutions, the basics and possibilities of a PWA. A PWA is actually just a basic web site that behaves like an App. Functionality like push notifications, offline usage, background processing (data loading from external resources, using Service Workers) can be implemented quite easily. We showed some neat examples of PWA's and we did a code walk through of a basic example (see the resources below). 

You can get started programming PWA's quick easily with the handson labs that Google provides. And that is just what we did during this evening.

In further sessions we can dive into more specific topics within the world of Progressive Web Apps, for example push notifications, background refresh, Service Workers and local storage.

An intermezzo on cryptography
Bart van Beek explained us the basics of cryptography, describing hashing strategies and answering questions from colleagues.

There definitely will be a sequel!

We are very enthusiastic on the PWA concept and it's potential to stirr the app development community. In upcoming Wednesday Evening Trainings we will take a deep dive in PWA related topics: notifications, service workers, local storage and combinations with other technologies like Web Assembly and frameworks like Angular. Also, we planned to take a security view on PWA's, what are the risks and how can we cope with these?

Also on cryptography, we'll will certainly discuss more cryptography topics in next Wednesday Evening Trainings.

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post? Here are some links…

On Progressive Web Apps:

All you need to know about Progressive Web Apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OJ24kCV-J8
Progressive Web Apps - Checklist: https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/checklist

Desktop Progressive Web Apps: https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/desktop
What Web Can Do Today - Can I rely on the Web Platform features to build my app? An overview of the device integration HTML5 API's: https://whatwebcando.today
PWA Rocks (PWA demo’s and example apps): https://pwa.rocks

Example weather app: https://weather-pwa-sample.firebaseapp.com/final

Build a PWA yourself? Here are a neat lab that we used in our training:
Your First Progressive Web App: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/codelabs/your-first-pwapp

On cryptography: 

Online examples of encrypting with well known standards: https://cryptii.com

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings

You 'll find post of previous sessions here: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Next week 's Wednesday Evening Training

Next week,  Aishwarya Dhall will give a workshop on the basics of Arduino's (IoT) development.