Book Image

Offline First Web Development

By : Daniel Sauble
Book Image

Offline First Web Development

By: Daniel Sauble

Overview of this book

When building mobile apps, it’s easy to forget about the moments when your users lack a good Internet connection. Put your phone in airplane mode, open a few popular apps, and you’ll quickly see how they handle being offline. From Twitter to Pinterest to Apple Maps, some apps might handle being offline better—but very few do it well. A poor offline experience will result in frustrated users who will abandon your app, or worse, turn to your competitor’s apps Expert or novice, this book will teach you everything you need to know about designing and building a rigorous offline app experience. By putting the offline experience first, you’ll have a solid foundation to build upon, avoiding the unnecessary stress and frustration of trying to retrofit offline capabilities into your finished app. This basic principle, designing for the worst-case scenario, could save you countless hours of wasted effort.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Offline First Web Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 8. Networking While Offline

Up until now, our work has followed a predictable pattern. Present a problem, figure out how to solve it, and implement the solution. This chapter is different. The problem is real, but the technology isn't in place to actually solve the problem.

The basic premise behind each chapter is that the Internet is required to sync your data. You can modify it and create new data offline, but to make it stick, you have to be able to connect to your Cloudant databases.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What it means to be offline

  • Device support

  • Platform-independent libraries

  • Synchronization over Wi-Fi

  • Making the setup less painful