Javascript on Rails

Question

Just started to experiment with HTML5 features and really like the localStorage.

And now I wonder if it makes sense to create some libraries which make life easier. Something which easily persists objects from the localStorage to the server-DB. Something like a object.findAllByAttribute(Attribute) etc.

So my question is: is there already something out there which helps me to write offline html5 applications? If not, would it make sense or am I thinking the wrong way?

Answer 1

backbone.js is a Javascript framework which will help make that task easier. It has support for localStorage as well as sync from server.

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/

This is an example application which make use of localStorage.

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/todos.html

This uses backbone localStorage adapter.

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/backbone-localstorage.html

Answer 2

I haven't used it myself but https://github.com/wycats/jquery-offline might be quite a good fit.

Also there is js-model which supports localStorage https://github.com/benpickles/js-model, I have used it and it is very good, I think syncing between localStorage and your server is probably fairly app specific though.