Omar Kilani of Remember The Milk took the time to write up his teams experience in Taking web applications offline with Google Gears.
The article moves past an introduction to delve into the design decisions around an offline-capable architecture, and user messaging and presentation of state. We learn why Omar decided to go with the explicit offline mode, and then the five steps to offline conversion:
- Ensuring resources are available offline
- Decoupling the application from the network
- Persisting data on the client
- Re-creating application state from persisted data
- Developing a synchronization strategy.
Omar Kilani wraps it up in his conclusion:
By now, you should be itching to add offline support to your web application (we hope!). If you should take anything away from this article, it's that taking your application offline isn't as hard or complex as it may first seem, and that Gears is a joy to work with (and it'll become even easier and more fun as the project matures and is used by more applications).Thanks to the Remember The Milk team for taking their application offline in record speed, and for taking the time to share their experience.
As for us at RTM, we couldn't be happier with Gears. The speed at which we were able to provide offline functionality (four days from reading the documentation to a launchable implementation) is a testament to the quality, ease of use, and production-readiness of Gears. Many thanks to the Google Gears engineers for their foresight and for making this an open source project to which members of the Internet community can contribute.
