Chapter 10. Offline web applications
This chapter covers
- Building a stable offline web application
- Synchronizing to a server in occasionally connected applications
- Understanding the constraints of building offline web applications
On a recent trip to visit family, I, Jim Jackson, had an opportunity to watch my nephew playing games and surfing the web on his iPod. I talked to him a little about modern web design and showed him a few sites with some interesting new features. Later, while in the car, I asked him to go back to one of the sites we had visited together. To his amazement, the site still worked!
Not having a background in software development, his was a pretty typical reaction to an HTML5 offline application. The idea that you can browse to an application while online, and then go back to it when you’re offline to continue reading or working, goes against everything most people have learned about how the internet works. But this offline-capable concept is gaining momentum and familiarity with users.
In this chapter, you’ll learn to build offline applications in the context of a simple shopping list application that can be edited online and offline. The build will be done in the following steps, with each step building on previous work: