Modern Web Apps expands and becomes React PWA!

By Christophe Porteneuve • Published on 22 December 2022 • 3 min

Time for changes! We just rebranded our flagship training course and upgraded it to track state-of-the-art techs and practices, as we always do. Modern Web Apps thus becomes React PWA (which also works in French), which emphasizes its core tenets much better.

Way more than just a rebranding

We took this opportunity to finally land a number of upgrades that have long been brewing:

• The 5 hours or so in the first day that were about upgrading everyone to modern JS are gone, as they had been for over a year in our Node.js training. In the first half of 2022 we took the time to enrich that content and make it available as detailed articles and videos in our Idiomatic JS series. At the time of this writing, it’s not yet available in English, but we’re working on it! If you want to try your luck at the French content, here’s the article series and the video series.
• This frees time to not only do more autonomous practice and challenges, but also explore PWA facets further.
  • So far we had implemented notifications, full offlining thanks to a Service Worker, installability with a Web App Manifest, and shortcuts for deeper OS integration of common in-app actions.
  • We’re adding Web Share (as a standard provider of shareable content) and explore opportunities for relevant use of more PWA-style APIs, such as Badging.
• A top-notch TypeScript variant is also available, on request, for in-house training.
• We took a more formalized approach to “homework”, which are optional, self-paced, autonomous workshops for those of you who like to start over from scratch and refine their freshly-learnt skills every evening, outside of the training’s main app curriculum.

👉🏻 Check out the full curriculum for the React PWA training 👈🏻

Very soon we’ll also blend in more server-side API calls (we currently just do authentication), in order to highlight the various possible incremental data looading orchestration approaches, with a special emphasis on how the latest React Router does it, heavily inspired by Remix.

An origin story

In late 2011 and early 2012, we had launched short, 1-day trainings around vanilla JS and its standard library (“JS Puissant”) on the one hand, and modern front-end development on the other hand (“JS Guru”). By late 2012, it had become apparent that many clients indeed needed both sides and wanted to explore that space further: “360° JS” was born.

Back then, a modern approach relied on Brunch, Backbone.js (hence jQuery and Undescore.js), Jade (now Pug), Stylus, Web Storage (via Lawnchair), Application Cache and a rather hands-dirty management of the DOM.

Still, that took us pretty far: 100% client-side apps with persistence, usable and even launchable offline… over 10 years ago!

What’s in a name?

In 2015 we rewrote that course entirely to track the state of the art of building rich, performant front-end apps. Goodbye Brunch, Backbone.js, jQuery, Underscore.js, Lawnchair, Jade, Stylus and Application Cache; hello Webpack, React, Redux, Material UI, Jest, SCSS and ServiceWorker! An ambitious rewrite.

In the meantime, we got more and more requests for a comprehensive course on JavaScript and its standard library. Something to look into every nook and cranny, every syntax, every built-in piece of functionality. As a matter of fact, the name “360° JS” was confusing to prospects who couldn’t be bothered to browse the curriculum, and thought that course was exactly that.

We knew that name was more fitting to a language-oriented course, but didn’t want to just transfer the existing name: that would have caused a great deal of confusion. We decided to name the new course “360° ES” and renamed the front-end one “Modern Web Apps”.

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