Integrate Offline support

[addyosmani]

I'd like to integrate first class support for offline into Aura, something similar to:

https://github.com/Ask11/backbone.offline

At present, whilst offline isn't strictly a part of the originally planned architecture I strongly feel that there are advantages to giving developers the ability to use this out of the box.

To summarize: the way this works is that when a connection is no longer available we start syncing using local datastores (e.g localStorage), re-syncing with a server when a connection comes back.

[addyosmani]

There is also https://github.com/lucian1900/Backbone.dualStorage, which is of interest.

[addyosmani]

@dustinboston what do you think of the idea?

more info on offline in general: http://diveintohtml5.info/offline.html

[dustinboston]

@addyosmani - Unless there is a reason for Aura itself to be managing connectivity I think it's up to the widget developers. It might be fun to demonstrate it as an extension though.

[addyosmani]

@dustinboston I was thinking the same. As this is Backbone specific we could easily get it working in place of the default localStorage adapter. The only change to the demo would be that it would require a backend of some sort (which can be very simple, even something like an option from https://github.com/addyosmani/backbone-boilerplates/) and that would be it.

[dustinboston]

@addyosmani Great idea - I would love to see how you use MongoDB. Would this make it harder for folks to simply download the demo and run it locally? I think that's a great benefit of the demo right now.

[addyosmani]

@dustinboston I think if we introduced one more set of dependencies, we would either have to get people setup using an install script or provide two demos - one with the backend and one without. Do you think we should provide 2 examples or will one suffice?

[dustinboston]

@addyosmani Honestly I think the demo is the most valuable when once can just download and start playing immediately. I think we should punt on this one or leave it out.

[addyosmani]

@dustinboston Happy to leave this out for now. If we end up making the demo app more complex, we may consider looking at this again. Definitely more we can improve before thinking about these types of concerns :)

[dustinboston]

@addyosmani marking this as closed for now.