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March 29, 2019

Creating Progressive Web Apps with

Oracle Visual Builder
Shay Shmeltzer
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT - ORACLE

Progressive Web Apps (or PWA for short) combine the advantages of on-
device mobile app experience with the distribution simplicity offered by
regular web applications. The latest version of Oracle Visual Builder
offers a very easy way to create and distribute your PWAs in a visual
cloud development environment.

PWA apps can work offline, leverage device features such as access to
the camera, photo gallery, and location information. The app is
downloaded to the device, represented as an icon on the device list of
apps, and when it is invoked you don't see a browser wrapper (no
address bar and browser navigation buttons). As such the user
experience of working with such application is very close to applications

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9/1/2019 Creating Progressive Web Apps with Oracle Visual Builder | Oracle Visual Builder Cloud Service Blog

that you get from the app store.

A key difference between PWA and on-device mobile apps is the

distribution mechanism. To first "install" the application the user will
navigate to a URL using their browser, this will pop-up an option for them
to "add the application to home screen". Once they do this the app is now
part of their "apps list" on the device. When a new version of the app is
published, the end user doesn't need to go to the app store to download
it. The application will automatically update on the device the next time
you'll open it. Pulling the new UI from the server and caching it for future
use.

One more point to mention is that PWA can also install on your laptop, for
example as a chrome app. This means that unlike the on-device mobile
apps in VB that are limited to just iOS or Android devices, PWA apps are
able to also run on windows, macs and other OSs.

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9/1/2019 Creating Progressive Web Apps with Oracle Visual Builder | Oracle Visual Builder Cloud Service Blog

As you'll see in the demo video below, developing a PWA app is no

different then developing regular mobile apps in Visual Builder, there is a
configuration tab that allows you to turn on the PWA packaging for any
mobile app. Once you do this, when you stage the app, you'll get a URL
(and a QR code) that customers can access to invoke/install the app.

Check out this demo

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) Development with Oracle Visual Buil…

Buil…

A couple of notes about the app in the demo

While we enabled unauthenticated access to the app, you can of

course limit application access to specific users

The data caching shown in the demo is the result of the REST
service specifying a caching mechanism in the header. For more
complete caching control and capabilities VB PWA apps can

leverage the Oracle JET offline toolkit.

The take a picture action also works when running on your laptop, it

will open the local file selection dialog.

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