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

Adding an online data store


In the next chapter, we will start to improve the to-do app to support our revised workflow. Before we do this, we need a place to store our data online, which supports device syncing and user sharing. We'll use CouchDB for this.

CouchDB is a NoSQL database that makes certain things very easy: database synchronization, data access (via a built-in REST endpoint), and user management. There are several places to get a free CouchDB database online. We'll use IBM Cloudant to provide this service.

Creating a Cloudant account

IBM Cloudant is an online database host. It's free as long as your monthly usage is less than $50. One alternative is Iris Couch (www.iriscouch.com), which works in basically the same way. For now, let's use Cloudant:

  1. Open www.cloudant.com in your browser.

  2. Click on Sign Up.

  3. Choose your credentials.

  4. Click on I agree, sign me up.

  5. Click on Add New Database.

  6. Name your database lists.

  7. Click on API URL to copy the link to your new database.

  8. Paste the link in a...