Progressive Web Apps Development: Study of Caching Mechanisms

Abstract

As part of the development of web applications, new paradigms have emerged creating new challenges to be considered in the development of applications. The concept of PWA (Progressive Web Application) introduces a new development architecture with new properties expected in the developed application. This paper aims to study PWA caching system, which is one of the main characteristics of a PWA. It is intended to address the different types of caching used either in a more traditional web application or in a PWA. Some metrics will also be studied to evaluate the performance caching systems. The methodology used to achieve the proposed objective starts with the development of two web applications: a traditional web application and another web application following the PWA recommendations. With the Google lighthouse tool, both applications were tested on both desktop and mobile devices. The results enable to sustain the performance advantages of PWAs over traditional web applications in specific contexts.