Overview
Magento’s PWA Studio is a set of tools that let you create Progressive Web Apps (PWA). This page provides a brief description of a Progressive Web App and its relationship to the PWA Studio project.
What is a Progressive Web App
A Progressive Web App, or PWA, is a term for any web application that uses modern web technologies and design patterns to provide a reliable, fast, and engaging user experience.
The following features define a basic PWA website:
- Fast - PWA sites use a variety of performance optimization strategies to provide a responsive experience or load content fast, even on slow networks.
- Secure - PWA sites use HTTPS connections for enhanced security.
- Responsive - PWA sites implement responsive design strategies to provide a consistent experience on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.
- Cross-browser compatible - PWA sites work equally well on all modern browsers, such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari.
- Offline Mode - PWA sites cache content to ensure that some content can be served when a user is offline.
- Mobile “Install” - Mobile users can add PWA sites to their home screens and even receive Push notifications from the site.
- Shareable content - Each page in a PWA site has a unique URL that can be shared with other apps or social media.
The RAIL model lays out the user-centric goals for PWA websites:
- Response – An application is receptive to the user’s request.
- Animation – It shows a movement to keep the user pausing.
- Idle – A PWA utilizes the “idle” second to cache content.
- Load – It loads under a moment.
Learn more about Progressive Web Apps:
What is the Magento PWA Studio project
The Magento PWA Studio project is a set of developer tools and libraries that let you develop, deploy, and maintain a PWA storefront on top of a Magento 2 backend. It uses modern tools and libraries to create a build system and framework that adheres to the Magento principle of extensibility.
Build tools
The pwa-buildpack package contains the main build and development tools for your PWA Studio project.
It provides features such as project setup tools, configuration management, and an extensibility framework.
When you use the CLI tool in this package to set up a new storefront project, it bundles and incorporates these tools into your new project to help you get started.
Custom React hooks and component
The venia-ui and peregrine packages contain custom React hooks and components for your PWA Studio project.
The venia-ui package provides React components that render the HTML structure of UI components in your storefront.
It uses components from the peregrine package, which provide components that manage state, calculate values, and fetch data from the backend.
These packages work together to provide features for your storefront project, but you can also pick and choose which components you need for your own customizations.
Demo storefront and backend
The venia-concept package provides a template for a PWA Studio storefront project.
When you set up a new storefront project, you get a copy of the content in this package, which is a fully operational storefront you can customize.
Magento also provides a shared Magento server to all PWA Studio developers to help you get started with development. The PWA Studio team updates and maintains this Magento server to ensure you are developing on the latest Magento version. This server also contains sample data for a fashion store to show the different features available from PWA Studio libraries.
Other notable packages
Other notable packages in PWA Studio include:
- pwastudio.io - Provides documentation to help guide developers towards creating a Magento PWA storefront
- UPWARD - A proxy-server concept that describes a highly configurable server that sits between the PWA storefront and backend services, such as Magento
- PageBuilder - PageBuilder extension for PWA Studio