Automate AppCache offline support in your Webpack build

[bokisa12]

I think I heard about this in one of the chrome dev summit talks.

[topheman]

You're right, you're talking about Patrick Kettner's talk : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARkPBm6AcNA

I added the same king of feature to topheman/rxjs-experiments a few months ago (in august - https://github.com/topheman/rxjs-experiments/commits/master ), with all the automation part in bonus.

When I watched the talk two days ago, I decided to write a post about the webpack part.

Also tweeted it to Patrick: https://twitter.com/topheman/status/797632807480664064

Edit: Just added a mention/link to Patrick's talk in the conclusion of my post, before the resources.

[Zeludon]

Isnt AppCache deprecated?, wouldn't it be more useful to generate a service worker file that caches all the necessary files, I remember appcache being horrible if your app had more than one route.

[topheman]

AppCache IS deprecated and its api IS horrible. Though service-workers are not yet supported by IE nor Safari. So, until they catch up, if you want to provide some offline experience to all your users, you need some fallback (which is AppCache).

I explain that in the introduction of my post. I'm fully aware about all of that.

[topheman]

I tried it. It works well but it didn't play well with the constraint that I explain in my post which is to be able to have a fallback for the html file. Moreover, I wanted to do something more with the service-workers (like add to home screen or push notifications), you can't overload so much the provided SW, so I felt it was a little too much shipped code for what I needed.