What is the best approach to develope a large connected/disconnected application

Question

We need to write an application that has two parts: One side of the users will be using it running in a disconnected environment (connecting every few hours to the internet), the other side will be fully connected monitoring the disconnected clients. The requirement exists that it must run on a browser.

We are proficient in PHP so I think we are going this route, my question is.. how would you lay this out on a high level?

Use web services for everything? DB replication with each client having their own DB? Use of PHP frameworks?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Unless you want to hassle with installing webservers (with PHP) on each clients' computer, i would definately NOT use PHP for the disconnected clients (disregarding the fact that you could create a nice installer for the whole package).

Since you MUST install a webserver to allow use of a disconnected PHP 'client-side' application, this also defeats the requirement of that it must run in a browser (if that is the sole requirement).

I would look at something else (like Java), compile it and use offline storage like files or even a lite db like sqllite and then just sync it every now and then.