Web Info & Tutorials

Brad Neuberg created some examples of offline projects in order to find a common UI or offline web applications for the Dojo Offline Toolkit.

He has put together examples for Gmail, Blogger, and a corporate portal.

Gmail Example

The first thing to notice is the addition of a new widget on the left-hand side of the page, the Offline Info widget. This widget encapsulates all of our offline functionality for Gmail.

If the Dojo Offline Toolkit is installed and you sign into Gmail, Gmail will automatically download your 100 newest emails into the offline cache. Now you can access Gmail offline to read your newest emails or compose new ones. When you sign back on your emails will be automatically synced and uploaded.

Blogger

On page load, Blogger would automatically download the last 10 blog posts, including images used in those posts. Individual blog posts indicate next to them if they have been locally modified (”modified offline”). If a blog post is not downloaded offline yet, the link “Download offline” appears, which when clicked causes the Offline Info widget to show download progress information, just like a sync. If you have local items that have not been synced, and have elected to sync manually, a small ‘(recommended)’ label will appear next to the Synchronize button.

The rest of the offline UI is pretty much the same, including the DOT download page, the syncing UI, and the configuration UI. The configuration UI might possibly have a small number of application-specific configuration, such as “[10] Newest Posts Synced,” where [] is a text field that can take a number.

Nokia has had a sound that supports Safari for awhile. A Nokia lad was at the prototypal Ajax Experience in San Francisco terminal May pass soured the phone. It had the aforementioned features that Safari on the iPhone has (zooming around scheme pages).

Opera Mobile is also rattling favourite on assorted makes of phones. With the Brobdingnagian mart that ambulatory represents, and the fact that we are ease ontogeny up wrt broad pace admittance on these devices, it module be engrossing to wager the ambulatory covering struggle advancement (and how it haw differ: IE vs. FF on desktops, Safari vs. Opera on mobile).

We can’t exclusive amend Ajax apps and wait them to impact enthusiastic on the ambulatory modify factor, and we hit talked in the time most how Ajax could be a discompose here (updating an Atlantic of the covering that the ambulatory individual can’t modify see).

Joel Webber pinged the GWT google group most how GWT could hold discover in antiquity applications that impact crossways boundaries:

It’s enthusiastic that these browsers are recent and full functional, but the devices aren’t meet same concealment PC’s. They hit assorted (smaller) modify factors, signaling methods, and (probably) ingest patterns. And the digit browsers participating are the digit that commonly intend based *last* (if every) by most scheme developers, but that you intend pretty such for liberated with GWT.

Perhaps what we requirement here is the construct of ‘device profiles’ in hosted mode, that module hold you essay discover your applications in assorted scenarios, to wager how assorted users module wager and interact with your app. Let’s feature the Wii has no beatific keyboard hold (just by artefact of example, I hit no intent whether it does or not) — if you poverty Wii users to ingest your app, it would be a rattling beatific abstract to place yourself in their shoes. This would also be adjuvant for automatically disagreeable discover assorted concealment sizes (a aggregation of grouping are ease on 800×600 or 1024×768 screens).

One of the enthusiastic things most GWT (IMHO) is that it makes it cushy to alter discover implementations of classes using delayed binding. I undergo this feature is not as full registered as it should be (yet), but satisfy it to feature for the time that it would attain it rattling cushy to precompile assorted versions of your app for assorted browsers. Imagine that you poverty to hold the iPhone, but its 480×320 concealment filler rattling needs a assorted UI than the digit you pass to connatural scheme users. Well, ground not delimitate digit EntryPoints that ingest assorted subsets of your application’s UI, and permit them be designated depending on the figure streaming it? The example of this is
that, if you’ve separated your app nicely into Composites, it’s rattling exclusive diminutive turn of assorted code, and apiece figure pays exclusive for the cipher necessary to separate its UI. Formalizing the construct of figure profiles and automatically desegregation it with delayed protection could attain this impact relatively pain-free.

Fun clog to conceive about.