offline website

Question

There is a requirement to have a offline website. It is like when the connection is available the client or the browser on the PC will download contents required and when there is no internet the client will access be still available with the data which was downloaded earlier.

During the discussion there was a suggestion to use http://code.google.com/apis/gears/ .

Kindly let me know what are all the other frameworks available to solve this problem.

Answer 1

as greg notes, gears indeed will be phased out by google, html5 is supposed to replace gears for offline webapps.

most important specs:

• " appCache " (to store files locally)
• " localStorage " (to store strings)
• " webDB " (to store structured data, will not be official part of html5 though).

and some examples;

• sticky notes (appCache+webDB): http://ajaxian.com/archives/view-source-tutorial-sticky-notes-with-html5-and-css3
• todo list manager (appCache+localStorage for simple strings +sync while online): http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/01/offline-web-applications/
• trappist db (appCache + localStorage for structured data, disclosure: blatant self-promotion): http://futtta.be/NoWebDB/

Answer 2

HTML 5 will contain many of the features that were previously available in Gears. The Gears API Blog has an entry titled Hello HTML5 that explains more about this. Google has stopped development on Gears itself and is concentrating their efforts on HTML 5.

Answer 3

Silverlight (or I can guess Flash) also could be used as offile storage. But as for me this is kind of overuse. May be this is better to think about ligtwait desctop application. Silverlight desktop mode? Or Adobe Air?

Answer 4

Save yourself some time searching :-) --->> There are many already spun JavaScript libraries to make offline storage, and even syncing when online, easier. A large list of existing libraries on this topic on github here . Notice JayData (open source and commercially backed) PouchDB (open source and very active and has a sync when online feature). Other possible ones that look decent: TaffyDB, Store.js, Kizzy, BankersBox. As of this writing, I checked out each of the other ones not mentioned here and they are either old, very small or defunct - so hope I can save you some time. One other commercially based one is SequelSphere which is free for individual or commercially with 10 users or less.

Answer 5

Another option is to use server2go this can setup a stand alone web service with the website. Then used in conjunction with an app called bitsync it could sync the offline and online data.