The life of an offline application starts with identifying whether the device/browser is online or offline and, based on that, taking the appropriate action. In this recipe, we will see the different ways that we can identify whether the device or the browser is online or offline, which would help us make decisions in the subsequent recipes. We will start with using PhoneGap API to detect the mode and then later look at other alternatives.
We have already set up our project with PhoneGap support as part of the setup in Chapter 1. You may refer to http://docs.phonegap.com for more details on its APIs.
Make sure that you have set up your development environment by following the recipes outlined in Chapter 1.
Create a new folder named ch08
in the same folder where we created the ch01
and ch02
folders. We will be using this new folder in which to keep the code.