The Gopher Wood PWA Journey, Part 0: How It All Began
How I started designing and building my first progressive web app.
Gopher Wood Clinic is a clinic that is one-of-a-kind. It is an amalgamation of traditional Western medicine, Homeopathy, and clinical nutrition. And yeah, it’s my dad’s business, which he started when he was already in his 50s. As with any business in this tech-saturated era, Gopher Wood Clinic needed an app so users can check real-time queue numbers, make appointments online, see information and announcements from the clinic, etc. You know, the gist of what most businesses do. I have been tasked with (and sort of volunteered to) building the app for this unique clinic, and here is how I started designing/building it (so far).
What to use?
First decision, of course, was what technologies I wanted to use in order to build the app. The contenders for the frontend were straightforward — React, Angular, and Vue. Of these big names, Angular was the only one I’ve never touched before, and it was immediately thrown out the window because I was looking for something much lighter. However, I was never quite satisfied with either React or Vue (for reasons I might disclose in some article in the future), and I also wanted to learn something new while I was building the app, so my eyes landed on Svelte and its framework, Sapper. You can read more about Svelte in this official blog post, where NY Times graphics editor and active open sourcer Rich Harris detailed how and why he came up with this new technology.
Sapper comes with its own client and server, so I didn’t have to think about what to use for my server. And so it was decided. Sapper was the way to go!
