Need to take the web app offline...

ixalmida

I'm just starting to investigate the best way to do this. My company has salespeople who are constantly traveling or at customer sites and would like to do some of their project/cms work without needing an internet connection. They already have an estimating tool called QuotaMaker that allows them to work offline and then "sync" up when they get back online, so the expectation is something similar.

What I'm not sure of at this point is the technology I want to use to build the offline app. My first instinct is to go with "what I know" and use VB for the front-end and a file-based (MDB?) back-end. This would be challenging and time-consuming to develop, but would probably work.

Is there a better/easier way of building such an app? Or perhaps a way to package all the components and code needed to build a client-based WAMP application?

Any suggestions?

toasty2

Visual Basic would be one of the best approaches. This will allow you to tailor the interface to your company's standards, as well as brand it.

While you could use the Internet Control in VB6 to do a live update (assuming an internet connection), you could also do a fail safe to a CSV file (comma separated values).

One thing to note about handling files in VB, and parsing a CSV, is that commas should be encoded or exchanged for a different character not used. Use VB's replace() function to do this.

Then, on your web app, simply make a database import page (so they can "sync" the offline data).

ixalmida

Good point. I could just have the sync function dump everything to CSV files and upload them to the server, then have the server process the CSV files. That would certainly make any sync problems easier to troubleshoot because I could examine the csv files.

There's also the possibility of moving to XML services, which is completely new to me but I find myself having to learn about it due to a 3rd-party data exchange I'm dealing with.