Offline capability / SW

[NekR]

@insin are you interested in integrating offline-plugin into nwb? Do you think that would be possible with nwb's architecture? e.g. because offline-plugin requires runtime to be added to the entry file.

[insin]

Yes, definitely, I suppose that makes #203 a dupe of this, but I haven't used offline-plugin or the alternatives so don't know the pros and cons of each.

We can tweak entry config at any stage when we've detected that a feature has been enabled, be it cli options/user config or whatever.

[NekR]

@insin I think it's more like this blocks #203 since PWAs are more than just SW :-) I'll try to write pros and cons here of different libs today.

[NekR]

Okay, here are some pros/cons I wrote a while ago: facebook/create-react-app#192 (comment)

Other thing, probably not mentioned there is that sw-precache and its wrappers for webpack work very bad with webpack-dev-server and probably some other things. The reason is that it sw-precache doesn't use webpack's built-in mechanism to output files, but rather just write it to the file system. This obviously couldn't work normally with dev-server since it uses in-memory file system.

Other pros of offline-plugin:

• More downloads: 210k month vs ~30k month sw-precache
• sw-precache/sw-toolbox are kind of deprecated. Google still supports them, but they work on "new kind of ServiceWorker tools" which aren't even nearly ready for production.

Other cons of offline-plugin:

• It isn't being done by Google
• It has a bit fewer functionality than sw-precache
• ??? something else

/cc @developit

[tomByrer]

sw-precache has more stars & forks.
offline-plugin is more recently & frequently updated.

Preact CLI uses sw-precache now. but Preact's website uses offline-plugin 😆

Any news adding one of these?