Puzzled by all the new architectural choices possible when trying to build an offline-capable web application? So were we until we decided to design the newly launched Gmail Mobile Web for iPhone and Android's offline capabilities by analogy with microprocessor caches: offline via a portable write-through caching layer running on either HTML 5 or Gears databases.We first demonstrated the utility of this architecture in June 2008 by building AtomDB and its recommendations for application architecture. See details in my original post titled: Mobile databases or write-through Web caches.
I couldn't be more amused as Gears was initially touting an application-specific switch for offline-ready Web apps, which would be an absolute nightmare for app developers and users. All the best to Google for marketing this new term, which we had coined.
2 comments:
Yours is the most sane discussion I have heard about offline web applications after much research.
I read your BITSY paper. Care to share your code and some additional details about your implementation? (what browser was the add-on for, etc.)
Incidentally, I just asked a related question on Stack Overflow today: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/987509/offline-web-application. The question was apparently not interesting for the community there. Maybe you on the other hand would have a word of wisdom or two to share with me, if you feel so inclined.
You can reach me directly at: maxime.larose AT gmail DOT com.
@max3000
We were desirous of sanity and also alignment with Web architecture.
Also, in case you haven't already noticed, BITSY spec, v0.5 is a recognition of the fact that synchronization is not a one-size-fits-all problem. It also talks of an "embedded" local Web server running inside the browser.
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