2016/Brighton/serviceworkers

Service Workers Use Cases was a session at IndieWebCamp Brighton 2016.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/serviceworkers

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IndieWebCamp Brighton 2016 Session: service worker use cases

Participants

• Jeremy Keith
• Glenn Jones
• Andrea Rota
• Sven Knebel
• Sebastian Lasse
• Martin Tomes
• Erik Erskine

Notes

• basics: can intercept and handle failures for HTTP access to resources on a page
• require HTTPS
• installed via JS

adactio:

• caches index pages -> offline readable

no magic, everything has to (but can be) implemented as desired using relevant APIs:

• Cache API (intercept requests, store/fetch results to/from cache)
• BackgroundSync API allows to schedule requests for later https://github.com/WICG/BackgroundSync/blob/master/explainer.md
• notifications API (also allows notifications when the browser is closed)
• postMessage API (send message between tabs and service worker)

use cases (easy -> complex):

1. cache assets
2. custom offline page
3. cache first, then update
4. network first -> start timer, if network to slow use cache
5. allow user to store individual sites in local cache (e.g. read later)
6. cached shell available: service worker can mark requests and only fetch partials and build them together