PWA vs Packaged

It's important to know that the OHIF Viewer project provides two different build processes:

# Static Asset output: For deploying PWAs
yarn run build

# Single `.js` script, for embedding viewer into existing apps
yarn run build:package

Progressive Web Application (PWA)

Progressive Web Apps are a new breed of web applications that meet the following requirements. Notably, targeting a PWA allows us provide a reliable, fast, and engaging experience across different devices and network conditions.

The OHIF Viewer is maintained as a monorepo. We use WebPack to build the many small static assets that comprise our application. Also generated is an index.html that will serve as an entry point for loading configuration and the application, as well as a service-worker that can intelligently cache files so that subsequent requests are from the local file system instead of over the network.

You can read more about this particular strategy in our Build for Production Deployment Guide

Commonjs Bundle (Packaged Script)

The @ohif/viewer package is built with WebPack to provide a React component that can be dropped into a larger application. The OHIFViewer component is the entire viewer, configurable via React props. This is useful for including the OHIF Viewer in a larger web application, as the entire application can be provided via a <script> tag with no build process required.

The bundle is not as performant or as optimized as the PWA build. It includes fonts, styles, and the core extensions. If you find yourself facing performance issues, you may wish to tweak what's included in this bundle or switch to the PWA build.

You can read more about this particular strategy in our Embedded Viewer Deployment Guide