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

Platform-independent libraries


Now that we've had an overview of the different protocols available, let's look at a few libraries to help you implement these connections. First, the bad news: there are no platform-independent options for Bluetooth, NFC, or USB. The good news: platform-independent synchronization over Wi-Fi is possible as long as you're willing to manually create an ad hoc network on one device and connect to it from the other device.

USB

From a security and reliability standpoint, it's hard to beat wires. The primary problem with USB is that not all mobile devices include a USB port. However, if a port is available, this is a great way to share data between two devices. It avoids the complicated pairing of wireless protocols, relying only on a hard-wired connection.

You'll still want authenticate, but you don't have to worry about other people eavesdropping on the connection—something that all wireless connections have to worry about (though the shorter the range, the less...