Service workers (sw): facilitating offline accessibility in web applications

Consistent access to web application contents is of paramount importance to its end users. Irrespective of a user’s location and the internet condition, there is the desire to interact with web applications, particularly through the use of mobile devices. Attempts have been made by previous researchers to introduce the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) caching otherwise known as the browser cache which is automatically enabled by the browser and the Application Cache (AppCache) as an attempt to foster offline accessibility. While these approaches have helped, there still exists the problem of poor memory management and content validity. A systematic Literature Review (SLR) was done on existing techniques, after which an overview of Service Workers (SW) and the identification of various SW caching strategies were proposed. Any of the proposed SW strategies can be adopted by web application developers based on the network condition and the contents of the application as this will help in reducing the loading time of the application, promote efficient mobile memory management, and increase the number of active users