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

Offline databases


There is really only one requirement of a good online database: synchronization. If a database solves the problem of making multiple databases eventually consistent, it's probably an option worth considering. There are many choices available: derby.js, Lawnchair, Firebase, remotestorage.io, Sencha Touch, Hoodie, PouchDB, and others.

Some of these are pure databases; others provide end-to-end offline-first development frameworks. For simplicity, we will focus on four: Sencha Touch, PouchDB, remotestorage.io, and Hoodie.

Sencha Touch

We've chosen Sencha Touch to build our offline app. As we saw in Chapter 2, Building a To-do App, Sencha Touch provides support for multiple types of backing stores and makes it trivial to swap between them. Some of these backing stores, such as LocalStorage, are offline-based. In a way, Sencha Touch is less about storing data offline and more about providing an easy interface layer between the frontend and data.

Why isn't LocalStorage sufficient...