This issue publishes the term buzzword: Progressive Web Application.
Opening Remarks:
Progressive Web Application (PWA) is a web application that is structured from a normal web page or website, but can be presented to users in the form of a traditional desktop application or a native mobile application. The main improvement of PWA over ordinary web applications is the improvement of interactive experience and performance in order to simulate the quality of native applications as much as possible [1]. PWAs can achieve a certain degree of ubiquity, feature richness, and as close as possible to the user experience of native applications. It is not strictly attached to the native software ecosystem, and can achieve cross-platform interactive experience through Runtime or browser; it is silently installed, users go as they go, take as they go, pay-per-use; it is updated in real time, and if the network environment allows, the latest version will be provided by default to ensure a better experience for users [7]. In the era of ubiquitous computing, PWA has a natural advantage in providing users with a continuous and consistent interactive experience across devices and platforms, and is one of the important supporting technologies for the next generation of interactive applications.
Progressive Web Application
Author: Jia Zhaohui (Lenovo Group), Lu Yuan (Dingdao Zhilian), Zhang Yinshuai (Dingdao Zhilian), Yi Xin (Tsinghua University)
InfoBox：
Chinese name: Progressive web application
Foreign name: Progressive Web Application
Discipline: Human-computer interaction
Keywords: browser technology, web technology, universal computing
Essence: Network application technology interface
background:
With the development of ubiquitous computing, people can get the information and services they need anytime, anywhere. In such scenarios, an interface or application that goes beyond the screen of a single device will provide new ways for humans and digital content to interact. Among them, thanks to its cross-device and operating system ubiquity, user-centric security model, unified cloud service system and other characteristics, the Web has become a unique software development platform. However, due to the lack of a lot of capabilities in the period of great development of the software ecosystem, the vast majority of users choose platform-specific native applications (APPs). They are rich and reliable, and keep working when network connectivity is missing. At the same time, users can control and use the input and output interfaces (such as USB, Bluetooth, files) of the current device through local applications, and even the input and output interfaces of other devices connected in the same network environment. However, local native applications often require developers to carry out complex and cumbersome development and adaptation work when facing cross-device and cross-platform application scenarios, and it is also difficult to ensure a consistent and continuous interactive experience for users, so it cannot meet the interactive needs of the universal computing era.
PWA combines the advantages of web applications and native applications, on the one hand, it makes full use of the experience advantages of web technology in cross-platform, unified cloud services, etc., on the other hand, it can ensure that it has software capabilities comparable to acoustic applications. Form a unique application ecosystem that is powerful, easy to use, and easy to install. Thus, users can get rid of the huge and complicated management system interaction such as application download, installation, uninstallation, and upgrade, and realize the software service model of taking as needed and using and going. In addition, due to the cloud-native advantages of PWA, users' personal preferences, usage data and other information will be migrated with the account rather than the device, so that a high degree of consistency can be achieved across devices and systems.
Research Overview:
In 2015, Chrome developer Alex Russel and designer Frances Berriman first proposed the concept of PWA in Progressive Web Apps: Escaping Tabs Without Losing Our Soul, hoping that the technology would build better experiences across devices and contexts. Since then, Google has come up with tools to support the use of PWAs, such as the user-centric performance model (RAIL) to help developers review whether the experience during the PWA lifecycle can meet user expectations.[2] and the Web Vitals program to detect and define the impact of network quality signals on the user experience. Web Vitals defines the quality of user experience of PWA as data management for metrics such as first-time input latency (FID),[3] and google's major developer tools currently support the measurement of metrics in Web Vitals.[4]
In 2017, Sina Weibo introduced the PWA version of the Weibo application it is building at the Google Developer Conference, and in the same year, UC Browser released a new U4 kernel, which fully supports PWA technology, kicking off the prelude to the domestic PWA ecosystem.
In 2018, Giulia de Andrade Cardieri compared mobile apps, native web apps, and PWAs from a user experience perspective. The study found that even though PWA may have interaction issues, participants showed positive results in terms of experience, which greatly increased developer confidence in using PWA technology to develop cross-platform experience applications [5]. In the same year, Abhi Gambhir compared PWA with native applications in terms of performance, and discovered its advantages in cache, storage space, and so on. This shows that in terms of both experience and performance, PWAs are close to and will soon surpass native applications. Andreas Biørn-Hansen said that PWA also has rich research value, and he believes that PWA has great potential to become a unified solution for web-native application development without using a cross-platform framework[6]. PWA is gradually approaching the trend of native applications, which has been fully verified in the industry, and the browsers of mainstream operating system manufacturers (Chrome, Edge, Safari) can support the use, installation and uninstallation of PWA.
After the technological maturity and quality of experience have been verified to a certain extent, foreign research fields have begun to focus on industry application research of PWA technology, in 2018, Mhaske discussed the application of PWA in the field of education[8]; in 2019, Nurwanto Nurwanto implemented PWA on e-commerce websites, allowing users to tap its icon directly on the mobile phone screen to run[9]; in 2020, Dat Huynh developed a "for" The Building Digital Twin's PWA visualizes, interacts, and provides a timely communication channel between owners and building systems[10].
In recent years, domestic Internet service vendors such as Tencent, Alibaba, and Byte have also released PWA versions of applications. Among domestic equipment manufacturers, Lenovo Group established a subsidiary Dingdao Zhilian in 2020, which will fully support PWA in its self-developed operating system and build its own ecology. Try to enhance the coordination of hardware on the basis of PWA. It was named progressive collaborative computing architecture, abbreviated as PCCA. In 2021, Intel and Dingdao Zhilian jointly held China's first "PWA Developer Day", and Intel, Lenovo, Alibaba, Tencent, Google and other companies shared their application examples in the field of PWA. Form a platform for the latest research progress and achievements of domestic PWA developers.
However, there are still many problems to be solved in the industrialization of the PWA ecosystem in China, for example, in terms of software service distribution platform and payment, the PWA ecosystem cannot truly replace the application store. Some domestic hardware and software attempts, based on their experience in traffic and commercialization, have also proposed web application technology standards similar to PWA, the most famous of which are the mini programs released by WeChat in 2016 and the "fast application" standards jointly organized and released by 9 mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei, Xiaomi, and Lenovo in 2018 [11].
Summary and Outlook:
PWAs are essentially a web application, but rely on incremental enhancements that give modern browsers a wider range of capabilities. Use Service Workers and web application manifests to make web applications reliable and installable. In today's Internet of Everything, the system barrier between different devices and the data barrier between different applications greatly hinder the user's cross-device interaction experience. PWA leverages a set of best practices and modern web APIs, combined with all the user-friendly features loved in "Android, iOS, desktop applications", to create a rich imagination space and lay a solid technical foundation for cloud-native web applications. However, PWA should change from pure technology to ecology, and also solve problems such as distribution and payment of software services. In the future, the web-based application software ecosystem such as PWA or Mini Programs and Fast Applications will provide users with an intelligent service experience of taking as needed, paying as you go, and going with the needs of PWA or Mini Programs and Fast Applications through service definition software, further supporting the user interaction needs of the universal computing era.
bibliography
[1] Richard S, LePage P. What are progressive web apps[J]. Retrieved February, 2020, 2: 2021.
[2] Measure performance with the RAIL model[J]. Last modified Jun, 2020, 10.
[3] Walton P. Web Vitals[J]. Web. de. Last modified April, 2020, 30.
[4] Core Web Vitals workflows with Google tools[J]. Updated Jan 18, 2022.
[5] de Andrade Cardieri G, Zaina L M. Analyzing user experience in mobile web, native and progressive web applications: a user and HCI specialist perspectives[C]//Proceedings of the 17th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2018: 1-11.
[6] Biørn-Hansen A, Majchrzak T A, Grønli T M. Progressive web apps: The possible web-native unifier for mobile development[C]//International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies. SciTePress, 2017, 2: 344-351.
[7] Analysis of Cache in Service Worker and Performance Scoring of Progressive Web Application Gambhir A, Raj G. Analysis of cache in service worker and performance scoring of progressive web application[C]//2018 International Conference on Advances in Computing and Communication Engineering (ICACCE). IEEE, 2018: 294-299.
[8] Mhaske A, Bhattad A, Khamkar P, et al. Progressive Web App for Educational System[J]. International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET), 2018, 5(1).
[9] Nurwanto N. Application of progressive web application (PWA) in e-commerce[J]. Techno. Com, 2019, 18(3): 227-235.
[10] Huynh D, Nguyen-Ky S. Engaging Building Automation Data Visualisation Using Building Information Modelling and Progressive Web Application[J]. Open Engineering, 2020, 10(1): 434-442.
[11] Do mobile phone manufacturers have a chance of winning by launching a "fast app" against a "mini program"? [J]. Computer Application Abstracts, 2018(7):1.
About the author
Lenovo Group
Jia Zhaohui
Research areas: desktop research and development, consumer electronics, personal computer products
Dingdao Zhilian
Lu Yuan
Research areas: web technology, browser technology, PWA, web-based operating system eco-design
Dingdao Zhilian
Zhang Yinshuai
Research Areas: Human-Computer Interaction Design, HMI, Intelligent Terminal Operating System Interaction Design
Tsinghua University
Yi Xin
Research Areas: Application Security, Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing
Introduction to the Terminology Working Committee and terminology platform:
The main function of the Committee on Terminology is to collect, translate, interpret, validate and recommend computer terms and promote them on the CCF platform. This is of great significance for clarifying the disciplinary system, carrying out scientific research, and widely disseminating science and knowledge in the whole society.
The construction and continuous optimization of the terminology crowdsourcing platform CCFpedia can effectively promote the collection, approval, standardization and dissemination of Chinese computer terminology, and at the same time play a role in promoting the customization of standardized standards in various fields.
The new version of CCFpedia Computer Terminology Platform (http://term.ccf.org.cn) integrates the editing and operation of terminology with browsing and use, abandons the tedious steps of cross-platform operation in the old version, and upgrades the interface observability, allowing users to easily and conveniently access terminology information. At the same time, the new version of the platform introduces the knowledge graph to organize all terminology data, and upgrades the application form of terminology browsing through the multi-layer association of the graph.
Working Committee on the Validation of Computer Terminology
director:
Ting Liu (Harbin Institute of Technology)
Deputy Director:
Haofen Wang (Tongji University)
Guoliang Li (Tsinghua University)
Assistant Director:
Li Yibin (Shanghai Haiqizhi Information Technology Co., Ltd.)
Executive Committee:
Ding Jun (Shanghai Haiqizhi Information Technology Co., Ltd.)
Lin Junyu (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Lan Yanyan (Tsinghua University)
Weinan Zhang (Harbin Institute of Technology)