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I created a scheduling software for beauty salons as a web application. The idea is that the business owner can schedule customer appointments with a hair stylist. I made it web based because eventually these beauty salons need to integrated into a larger cloud service. So far, I've only put in about 40 hours of coding.

One challenge i am encountering is that a lot of beauty salons may have poor internet connectivity. They may experience temporary outage that last several hours to several days. But during this time, they still want access to this web application .. at the very least for read only purposes.

I understand that html 5 in modern browsers support offline capabilities via things like localStorage and cache manifest. It appears to me that at the moment, I need to do a drastic rewrite of my existing application to make use of localStorage and cache manifest to allow the web application to work offline. The reason this is so is because my web application writes/saves a lot of information to urls like http://mywebsite.com/api/somefunction?queryparams=value1 via ajax calls. These ajax calls need to be replaced by function calls that write to localstorage.

So my questions are:

a) To enable my web application to work offline (at the very least, read only of the website should be offline), I should replace my ajax calls with calls to localStorage. Is this the best approach?

b) Would it have been better to create this application as a .NET desktop application? Especially if there are microsoft technologies that help with synchronizing stored client data with an external database at a later time?

John
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1 Answers1

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My opinion:

a) I wouldn't say you should replace your Ajax calls. Rather, you want your code to notice when it is offline and store stuff in localStorage then. You wouldn't always store in localStorage as your clients are going to be online sometimes.

b) That's kind of a loaded question I think. :) So... my thinking is this: Building a web site makes sense as it would let your clients at the salon access their data both from computers in the store and other devices as well. So for example - if the salon's internet access is down, the employees could perhaps use your website via their mobile phones too. Having the data be web bound gives them more ways to get to it.

Raymond Camden
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