Ilya Dreytser - Building offline enabled, data driven applications using jQuery, jQuery Mobile and P
Channel: jquery
Date: 2014-09-19

jQuery and jQuery Mobile together are a compelling platform for building mobile user experiences, but on their own they are missing one of the most important ingredients of native mobile apps – offline access. The good news is that all modern mobile browsers support one of the competing standards for HTML5 offline storage; the bad news is that there are competing standards, and the tools available for managing persistence in JavaScript are poor at best.

In this talk we will present a practical approach to building offline-enabled, data-driven applications using jQuery, jQuery Mobile, and PersistenceJS as an O-R-M abstraction on top of HTML5’s varying offline storage standards. Using this combination, we introduce a simple data synchronization paradigm that allows mobile HTML5 apps to download data, store and manipulate that data locally, and re-synchronize that data whenever the device is online. In addition, we present some of the benefits of viewing data stored in a database, including sorting, grouping, filtering, and full text indexing lists of data objects.

With offline storage added to the mix, mobile HTML5 starts to deliver on the promise of a fully cross-platform, browser driven experience that is just as good as any native app.