Show & Tell: Reskinable, plugin-free Church PWA running on an AI-first VDom with local Gemini Nano fallbacks

[josephbrewerton-oss]

Hello everyone!

I wanted to share a demo site I've been actively developing for St. Joseph's Fishponds. The source code is currently in a private repository as I'm still polishing it, but the live deployment is ready for testing on Google Cloud Run.

The architecture is built from the ground up to address the unique constraints of parish infrastructure (tight budgets, varying data speeds, and the need for longevity).

Core Engineering Highlights:

Ultra-Lightweight VDom: It uses a custom, AI-first TSX/JS Virtual DOM with minimal structural HTML. It is highly optimized and designed to work seamlessly on a 2G connection in the middle of nowhere, as well as on high-speed networks.

Universal & Reskinable: The entire site is plugin-free and built intentionally as a blueprint that can be easily reskinned for any church or parish.

The Parish Porter (AI Nano/Gemini Fallback): This is the core functionality. It is a native client-side assistant that handles parish questions and newsletter updates. To eliminate cloud server overhead and ensure extreme data privacy, it dynamically checks for and utilizes Chrome's native window.ai (Gemini Nano) to shift the intelligence layer directly to the user's local hardware, falling back to cloud endpoints only when necessary.

Zero-Plugin PWA: It instantly hooks into modern mobile operating systems as an installable application without third-party wrapper libraries.

The live testing link is open here: https://st-joseph-s-catholic-church-fishponds-374871139608.us-west1.run.app/

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this architecture, especially regarding local-first web AI patterns for community spaces!.

I have posted it on the Chrome Built-in AI Early Preview Program Discussions Google board but had little traction probably due to it being church based! The lighthouse scores prove it works quite well. Apologies if this is the wrong place to show this!!

Joe