iOS Progressive Web App - Notifications

I’ve been using Vaadin for a couple of my projects because of its ease of use. As someone who likes Java but doesn’t have much experience with React or similar frameworks, it’s been a good fit for me.

What’s Vaadin?

For anyone who doesn’t know: Vaadin is a full-stack web app platform for building applications in Java. Creating a UI is pretty straightforward using their online editor, you design the app to your needs, download it, and then open it in your editor of choice.

So I decided to try out the PWA (Progressive Web App) feature to build mobile apps that work on iOS devices. After getting that to run (more or less), I started thinking about adding notifications. Pretty quickly I realized it was going to be a pain to integrate them into my existing projects, so I spun up a new one called NotifyMe just for testing the system.

The idea was simple: a PWA for sending and receiving notifications on iPhones. In the end, it worked surprisingly well.

I learned a lot from this project, especially about service workers and how the whole Progressive Web App system is built. When I started, I just dove right in without reading much documentation (because I prefer to figure things out by trial and error). Of course, I eventually hit a wall, got frustrated, and ended up reading the docs anyway.

Disclaimer: I have used AI to help me build this project, because I'm still learning about PWA's :)