PWA Generator Option

[daftspaniel]

Progressive Web Apps are becoming more important and it would be great to write them in Dart with a nice template to get started via Stagehand

This would set up a core manifest.json.

Material design might be an option?

[kwalrath]

@filiph what do you think of adding pwa functionality to web-angular?

[filiph]

Great suggestion, @daftspaniel!

We now have the pwa package that makes it really easy to make web apps into PWAs (at least the offline part). But the experience is not 100% yet (for example, IntelliJ IDEA has a bug that I haven't filed yet that makes it really confusing to serve a project using pkg:pwa).

Stagehand should always be a bit behind the curve, comfortably in the stable land. But we'll get there with pkg:pwa and then all AngularDart apps will be offline-capable PWAs by default, from the start.

cc @isoos, @ferhatb

In the short term, we definitely should think about adding manifest.json. That's "for free" and doesn't break anyone.

To get startup namer to 100/100 Lighthouse PWA (last week's methodology) I needed only these 2 commits on top of pkg:pwa:

• filiph/startup_namer@168b068
• filiph/startup_namer@6eb09fb

So, my short-term proposal:

• Create AngularDart icons in the required sizes
• Add <link rel="manifest" href="manifest.json"> to index.html
• Add <meta name="theme-color" content="#2196F3"> to index.html
• Add manifest.json itself (example), filling in short_name and name with something meaningful.

WDYT?

[daftspaniel]

Thanks for pointing out the PWA package - looks really useful!

The above sounds great for Angular apps. I'd also suggest something like ''Bare-bones PWA" for those who want to use other frameworks or just want a minimal base.

[isoos]

pwa's code generator does create a manifest.json now, but I am still undecided how to balance reasonable defaults:
https://github.com/isoos/pwa/blob/master/examples/additional_offline_urls/web/manifest.json

While some of it comes from pubspec.yaml, others, like the theme_color is entirely arbitrary, and I've left a placeholder for the icons. If stagehand would do it differently, I'd change the pwa to follow the same pattern.