[Note: Some slightly technical content, but there are also posts that are less technical if that is of more interest.]
Update – I’ve published a lower level guide to Gears over on my other site: you can view Part 1 here.
The opportunities presented by allowing users to access web applications off-line are huge. In situations where internet access is unavailable, or where connectivity can disappear without warning (such as with certain providers in Ireland), providing a consistent experience to users is important. Simply saying, “you can’t do work now” is not enough for users that rely on an application.
Thinking about potential barriers to (me) relying on web applications for “important” functions, reliability of access is quite high on the list. For certain applications, such as word processing, task management & time tracking, to be “primary use” availability needs to be guaranteed. There is a difference between it being inconvenient when something is unavailable (such as news in your RSS feeds), and it being a big problem (such as losing work because your Internet Connection drops and you can’t save it).
There are a number of ways that this type of offline functionality can be introduced. ReadWriteWeb have published a number of articles on this in the past (linked at the end of the post), including a very good one recently which looked at ways taking web apps out of the browser’s control can be achieved. In it, they linked to a very good video of a presentation on developments with Google Gears (video on Youtube, 54 minutes long) which looks at some of the options when providing offline accessibility in web-based applications.
Gears is an open source project which aims to :
- Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
- Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
- Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
One of the most interesting approaches discussed (and one that I hadn’t heard of before) was using functionality provided by the dojo JavaScript toolkit which allows applications to check what local storage options are available (it looks for Gears, Flash storage, HTML5), and use one of them. The options are presented through dojo Storage in dojo Offline.
Off-line web application access can help to overcome some issues facing widespread adoption of web applications. Whether this type of functionality is “sold” as a feature up front, or simply integrated into services to help provide a more complete user experience remains to be seen. As versions of applications that traditionally lived on the desktop make their way onto the web, users will expect to have a similar experience. If the experience is sub-standard, what is the motivation for moving?
Pingback: Getting into Gears: Offline Web App Tutorial - Part 2 | Dave Kelly :: Blog