October 14th, 2020 × #web-app-updates#app-versioning#refresh-strategies
Hasty Treat - Updating / Restarting Long-Running Web Apps
Strategies for updating web apps and forcing users to get new versions, including manual refreshes, service workers, hot reloading, and visual notifications.
In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about updating web apps that have running for a long time — the problems to look out for and how to avoid them.
LogRocket - Sponsor
LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It's an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax.
Show Notes
01:54 - The problem
- This only affects the client-side
05:28 - What are some solutions:
- Do nothing and hope the user refreshes.
- Have a list of assets, or commit hashes. Poll the server periodically, and when there is a new version available:
- Prompt the user to refresh
- Just refresh the user (store current state in localstorage and restore)
- Do a custom component, that checks the last time the user has refreshed (or if new version if available). When they click the link, render a regular instead of a pushstate link.
- Use a service worker. They will emit an event when a new version is available. Use the above methods to refresh the user.
- Hot code push.
- Vuepress has "hot reloading" baked in.
Links
Tweet us your tasty treats!
- Scott's Instagram
- LevelUpTutorials Instagram
- Wes' Instagram
- Wes' Twitter
- Wes' Facebook
- Scott's Twitter
- Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets